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Fig. 13.10: A system for recording and decoding neuron activity. Power and data
are transmitted through wireless telemetry [159].
13.8 Related Advances in Other Neuroprosthetic Research
Real-time biosignal processing has also advanced in other applications of neu-
ral prostheses in addition to DBS, such as cardiac pacemakers [133], retinal and
cochlear implants [123, 69, 144], and brain-to-computer interfaces (BCI) [150, 62,
48, 91, 132, 161, 155, 49, 46]. In particular, pattern recognition systems for detect-
ing abnormal heart activity have been proposed for cardiac pacemaker technol-
ogy [133, 86]. Also, the decoding of neural activity in the premotor cortex of the
brain to control robotic limbs has been successfully implemented in experiments
with primates [111, 35]. Moreover, wireless telemetry and power transfer to im-
planted circuitry have been successful for cochlear and retinal implants [109]. There
has also been research on detecting epileptic seizures and building an artificial
hypocampus [72, 15].
Retinal and cochlear implants are relevant to DBS because of their wireless
power transfer and data telemetry capabilities [123, 69, 144], while real-time sig-
nal processing of biosignals seems to have advanced more in cardiac pacemak-
ing [6,103,128,42] and especially BCI systems [150,62,48,91,132,161,155,49,46].
A typical setup for the real-time transmission of biosignals from a neural im-
plant includes sensors (chemical or electrode) for detecting neural activity, signal
processing for coding the activity, and communications circuitry for transmitting
the information as shown in Fig. 13.10. In addition, the need for analog ampli-
fiers, filters, and stimulus generators is ubiquitous among these designs [159]. Thus,
methods included in the preprocessing and stimulus pulse generation stages have
