Title:  A Robust Wirelessly-powered Recording and Stimulation System for Freely-moving Animal Subject

Committee:

Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. John Cressler, ECE

Dr. Hua Wang, ECE

Dr. Omer Inan, ECE

Dr. Yoonsu Choi, UT RGV

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is is to develop a robust wirelessly-powered implantable recording and stimulation system for a freely-moving animal subject. Several innovative system- and circuit-level techniques are proposed towards the development of a novel wireless power transfer (WPT) system and an inductively-powered wireless implantable neural-recording and stimulation system (WINeRS) for a freely-moving animal subject. The dissertation includes 1) a high-efficiency and adaptive wireless power transfer system,2)  three-phase time-multiplexed scalable power Tx which has ability to wirelessly power a large number of distributed Rx with arbitrary angular and spatial misalignments across a large plane, 3) a novel wireless platform for electrophysiology experiments inside the standard homecage called EnerCage-HC, which takes advantage of multi-coil coupling and Kinect® based optical localization to offer an efficient and low-cost technology for wireless powering any electronics attached to a small animal subject and tract its behavior, and 4) a robust wireless implantable neural and peripheral recording and stimulation (WINeRS) system fully compatible with the EnerCage-HC system with measurement and in vivo experimental results.