A new prosthetic device for full bladder control

The design and testing of a versatile, implantable eight-channel urinary prothesis developed to restore a normal bladder function for patients with spinal-cord injuries are described. The main application of the device is the stimulation of particular nerves in the sacral roots. The intensity, the format and the timing of the current pulses available at the channel outputs are easily programmable. Those parameters are received transdermally by the implanted device in 13-bit blocks. The information is either loaded into internal registers for immediate processing or stored in an external implantable memory for a deferred processing. A miniaturized (4.51 mm*4.51 mm) implant has been implemented in 3- mu m CMOS full-custom technology, using a total of 12753 transistors. Tests have confirmed the functionality of the chip. >