A Reactive and Energy-Aware Two-Part Algorithm for Implanted Functional Electrical Stimulation

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a palliative solution to improve the daily life living of spinal cord injured patients; it has been successfully used in numerous applications such as pacemakers, deep brain stimulation, pain control or hearing restoration. In our context, implanted electrical stimulation is studied for movement rehabilitation like ambulation. We present here a new control system for FES applications based on networked stimulation over a 2-wire bus. Our algorithm is composed of two stages: the first stage can be computed off-line on a personal computer. It will explore exhaustively all possible scheduling of FES activities concerning the different functions. The second stage, embedded in the implanted controller of the distributed architecture, will exploit the results of the first stage to efficiently deal with any on-line situation