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Micro-Electronic Stimulators For Spinal Cord Injuries Being Tested by NJIT Researcher
The work, now in its third year of support from a four-year, $1.4 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, has resulted in the development and testing of a technology known by its acronym, FLAMES (floating light activated micro-electrical stimulators). The technology, really a tiny semiconductor device, will eventually enable people with spinal cord injuries to restore some of the motor functions that are lost due to injury. Energized by an infrared light beam through an optical fiber located just outside the spinal cord these micro-stimulators will activate the nerves in the spinal cord below the point of injury and thus allow the use of the muscles that were once paralyzed.
This past September, The Journal of Neural Engineering ("FLAMES tested in the rat spinal cord," http://iopscience.iop.org/1741-2552/8/5/056012) published the first testing in animals. "Our in vivo tests suggest that the FLAMES can be used for intraspinal micro-stimulation even for the deepest implant locations in the rat spinal cord," said Sahin.
"The power required to generate a threshold arm movement was investigated as the laser source was moved away from the micro-stimulator. The results indicate that the photon density does not decrease substantially for horizontal displacements of the source that are in the same order as the beam radius. This gives confidence that the stimulation threshold may not be very sensitive to small displacement of the spinal cord relative to the spine-mounted optical power source." Sahin spoke about this work at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in Boston, also in September of 2011.
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