Adaptive Thermal Management of Implantable Device

Abstract

The temperature increase in the surrounding tissue caused by the operation of neural prosthesis has raised growing concern as the device becomes more powerful. In this paper, a real-time adaptive thermal management method is developed for implantable devices to optimize their operation while maintaining a safe operating temperature. The method adopts a simplified thermal model for supporting real-time control and updates the model parameters online using a proposed recursive multi-step prediction error minimization method. The performance of the developed thermal management method is evaluated using simulation studies, and the results show that it can achieve longer operation time and better overall performance while maintaining the safe operating temperature. In addition, the developed thermal model is validated using both the COMSOL simulation and an in vitro experiment.