Single Source Driving Method of Communication for Functional Electrical Stimulation with Direct Feeding Method

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is the therapy used in the rehabilitation of lost movement functions, and to apply stimulation, the implanted direct feeding method was adapted. In this method, stimulus energy and signals for controlling devices are applied to the devices by a mounted system using magnetic coupling. In a previous study, the mounted coil was developed to be able to generate the magnetic flux for supplying energy and communication with the time-division exciting method. However, this exciting method reduces the communication speed to half of the specified speed of the mounted communication coil. In addition, the previous driving method requires an equal number of inverters as communication coils, which consumes a lot of energy. To address these problems, a new driving and exciting method have been proposed, in which the communication speed is not reduced and it needs a single inverter to excite coils. In this report, these new methods are introduced, and the experimental results show that the possibility of the whole area communication for the direct feeding method and the single source driving method.