Application Cases

Experiment Name: Experimental Study on Wireless Vagus Nerve Stimulation

Research Direction: Biomedical Engineering

Experimental Content: Utilizing a power amplifier to excite an external transmitting electrode, which forms a capacitive coupling effect with an internal receiving electrode, enables precise nerve stimulation.

Test Equipment: ATA-1200B power amplifier, function generator, signal generator, etc.

Experimental Process:

Figure 1: Experimental setup diagram for wireless vagus nerve stimulation

Figure 2: Schematic diagram of the wireless vagus nerve stimulation experiment

The entire capacitive coupling system was constructed using internal and external wireless power transfer components. The external part employed a circular gold foil with a diameter of 10 mm as the power transmitter electrode and a small rectangular molybdenum (Mo) sheet as the external grounding electrode. These were connected to the signal input terminals via copper wires. Waveform editing was performed using ArbExpress software to generate a composite waveform. The edited waveform was imported into a function generator and connected to the power amplifier (ATA-1200B, Aigtek, China). The power amplifier then output the signal to the external wireless power transfer component.

Experimental Results:

Figure: Experimental results

By leveraging the capacitive coupling mechanism based on electrostatic induction, precisely adjustable biphasic electrical pulses were generated from the input voltage waveform. The input voltage waveform consisted of a trapezoidal wave superimposed on a sinusoidal carrier wave. After waveform editing, biphasic rectangular pulses (±4 V, 1 Hz, 0.6 ms per phase) with a 0.15 ms interphase interval were produced. When voltage input was applied to the gold foil electrode of the wearable energy transmitter, the molybdenum foil energy receiving electrode in the BCC nerve stimulator efficiently output charge-balanced biphasic rectangular voltage pulses with an amplitude of approximately ±3.38 V, corresponding to an output short-circuit current of about 250 μA. Both the short-circuit current and open-circuit voltage increased with the input voltage, indicating that adjusting the input voltage to the gold foil transmitting electrode could achieve the output required for neural modulation.

Recommended Power Amplifier: ATA-1200C

Figure: ATA-1200C broadband amplifier specifications and parameters