Ultra-low-power miniaturized vagus nerve sensing platform for treating refractory epilepsy

Epilepsy is a disease that concerns 50 million people worldwide and can lead to severe complications in everyday life. One third of the epileptic patients cannot be cured with anti-seizure drugs. For those patients an alternative consist in stimulating the vagus nerve to lower the seizure frequency. Using neural data to detect the seizure onset can considerably improve the impact of the vagus nerve stimulation. The innovation of this study is to propose a digital implementation of the adaptive tripole to recover the neural signal with a microcontroller. Besides, the analog amplification level in front of the microcontroller is designed in order to match with the biological signal specifications. Tracks are given to further improve the performances of the system and consequently enhance the impact of vagus nerve stimulation for epileptic patients or for other peripheral nerve recording applications.