Functional electrical stimulation (FES) devices have direct applications in the realm of rehabilitation engineering, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and medicine for research, diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. This thesis presents a novel electrical stimulator for use in a FES system. The stimulator produces regulated current pulses using two switched mode power supplies (SMPS) in series. The first power stage - a flyback converter - steps up the supply voltage using primary side digital control. The second power stage is a buck converter with output current hysteretic control. An output switched capacitor circuit shapes the current pulses. All pulse variables are programmable and various pulses can be formed for virtually any FES application. Compared to previous FES devices, the pulses generated here are sharper, have faster rise time and the amplitude and temporal characteristics are more tightly regulated. A single channel prototype system is implemented and experimental results are shown.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/30133 |
| Date | 30 November 2011 |
| Creators | Tarulli, Massimo |
| Contributors | Prodic, Aleksandar, Popovic, Milos R. |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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