Abstract
In the present contribution, we introduce a wireless optical communication-based system architecture which is shown to significantly improve the reliability and the spectral and power efficiency of the transcutaneous link in cochlear implants (CIs). We refer to the proposed system as optical wireless cochlear implant (OWCI). In order to provide a quantified understanding of its design parameters, we establish a theoretical framework that takes into account the channel particularities, the integration area of the internal unit, the transceivers misalignment, and the characteristics of the optical units. To this end, we derive explicit expressions for the corresponding average signal-to-noise-ratio, outage probability, ergodic spectral efficiency and capacity of the transcutaneous optical link (TOL). These expressions are subsequently used to assess the dependence of the TOL's communication quality on the transceivers design parameters and the corresponding channels characteristics. The offered analytic results are corroborated with respective results from Monte Carlo simulations. Our findings reveal that the OWCI is a particularly promising architecture that drastically increases the reliability and effectiveness of the CI TOL, whilst it requires considerably lower transmit power when compared to the corresponding widely-used radio frequency (RF) solution.
Highlights
During the past decades, medical implants have been advocated as an effective solution to numerous health issues due to the quality of life improvements they can provide
The reliability of the optical wireless cochlear implant (OWCI) can be evaluated in terms of the corresponding outage performance
The above findings revealed that OWCIs outperforms the corresponding baseline cochlear implants (CIs) in terms of received signal quality, outage performance, spectral efficiency and channel capacity
Summary
Medical implants have been advocated as an effective solution to numerous health issues due to the quality of life improvements they can provide. One of the most successful application of such devices is cochlear implants (CIs), which have restored partial hearing to more than 350, 000 people worldwide, half of whom are pediatric users who develop nearly normal language capability [1, 2]. Conventional CIs exploit near-field magnetic communication technologies and typically operate in low RF frequencies, from 5 MHz to 49 MHz, while their transmit power is in the order of tens of mW [2,3,4,5]. The main disadvantage of this technology is that it cannot support high data rates which are required for neural prosthesis applications in order to achieve similar performance to that of human organs, such as the cochlea, under reasonable transmit power constraints [6,7,8]. By taking into account the interference from other sources operating in the same frequency band, RF transmission is largely rendered a mediocre solution [9,10,11]
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