Fabrication and electric field analysis of microelectrode array for visual prothesis

摘要

Our group is aiming to develop a visual prothesis, which is a device to recover the sight by electric stimulation. Since the device will be implanted in a body, the amount of the power supply will be limited. Therefore, our group have focused on a stimulation electrode array that is one of main components, and aimed to develop a low power consuming electrode array with which neurons are stimulated efficiently. This time, a stimulation electrode array that has 16 channels was fabricated on the polyimide thin film with 25μm and 50μm thickness, and the conductivity was confirmed. Moreover; tie electric field formed around stimulation sites was evaluated in computer simulation. As a result, obtained that formed the electric field was not broadly but narrowly spread around each stimulation sites when a pair of charge were applied to adjacent electrodes.