When conventional therapies fail, many patients with neurological and mental disorders may benefit from implantable deep brain stimulators. But a significant disadvantage is having surgery each time the batteries need to be replaced. Researchers from UConn present a novel technique for charging gadgets that makes use of a person’s breathing patterns in Cell Reports Physical Sciences.
With over 150,000 such devices implanted each year, deep brain stimulators are becoming increasingly widespread. Their electrodes are often implanted into the brain, and they are typically inserted under the skin in the chest region. To control the aberrant electrical activity of the brain, the electrodes zap it with electrical pulses many times each second.
People with Parkinson’s disease and other movement abnormalities may recover control over their muscular movements with the use of deep brain stimulators. Additionally, studies have shown that the approach may dramatically lessen the symptoms of mental disorders such as treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Deep brain stimulators need batteries, much as a pacemaker. Deep brain stimulator batteries often need to be changed every two to three years because of their high energy consumption, but pacemaker batteries normally last between seven and ten years. Furthermore, changing batteries needs surgery. A deep brain stimulator without batteries has been created by UConn chemists Esraa Elsanadidy, Islam Mosa, James Rusling, and his colleagues.
The novel gadget generates power from the user’s breathing motion in place of a battery. The triboelectric nanogenerator, which is a very tiny and thin electric generator, is pressed against the chest wall as the user breathes in and out. That movement is transformed into static electricity by the nanogenerator.
The idea is similar to rubbing a balloon on your shirt and sticking it to a wall. Due to their disparate static electric charges, the wall and the balloon are attracted to one another. In the triboelectric nanogenerator of the deep brain stimulator, charges from the more negatively charged material adhere to the more positively charged one, producing a current that charges a supercapacitor. Electricity from the supercapacitor is released to power the medical gadget and stimulate the brain.
According to Elsanadidy, “We developed our triboelectric nanogenerator employing novel nanomaterials that provide considerable energy output when they interact, sufficient energy to operate the deep brain stimulator.”
“This needed to blend in naturally with the rest of the available technologies. If someone already has a deep brain stimulator, we could theoretically simply swap out the batteries with this generator rather than retrofitting them with a whole new device “Jim Rusling, a chemist at UConn, adds.
The scientists put its triboelectric nanogenerator to the test by placing it inside the chest of a model pig with a pig lung attached to a pump. The pig’s lung pushes against the nanogenerator during breathing and exhaling, forcing two layers within the device to rub against one other and generate energy. The deep brain stimulator electronics are located outside the rib cage and are powered by a supercapacitor that receives energy via a tiny cable. The brain stimulator produced pulses 60 times per second using the supercapacitor’s stored power, much as a commercial device would.
“The regulated brain stimulator, effective energy storage, and efficient energy harvesting are all combined in one system for the first time. We showed that our self-sustaining deep brain stimulator can intermittently stimulate the brain tissue by switching between periods of stimulation and periods of no stimulation, which is an efficient deep brain stimulation approach for treating psychiatric conditions “Mosa, who is the system’s commercialization company’s chief technology officer and a member of UConn’s Technology Incubator Program, says. The gadget will next be tested on a huge animal as the following phase.
