Abstract
There is a critical need to transition research level flexible polymer bioelectronics toward the clinic by demonstrating both reliability in fabrication and stable device performance. Conductive elastomers (CEs) are composites of conductive polymers in elastomeric matrices that provide both flexibility and enhanced electrochemical properties compared to conventional metallic electrodes. This work focuses on the development of nerve cuff devices and the assessment of the device functionality at each development stage, from CE material to fully polymeric electrode arrays. Two device types are fabricated by laser machining of a thick and thin CE sheet variant on an insulative polydimethylsiloxane substrate and lamination into tubing to produce pre‐curled cuffs. Device performance and stability following sterilization and mechanical loading are compared to a state‐of‐the‐art stretchable metallic nerve cuff. The CE cuffs are found to be electrically and mechanically stable with improved charge transfer properties compared to the commercial cuff. All devices are applied to an ex vivo whole sciatic nerve and shown to be functional, with the CE cuffs demonstrating superior charge transfer and electrochemical safety in the biological environment.
Highlights
(or historically regulated) technologies.[3]
A common approach for peripheral nerve cuffs is to have them pre-formed to specific nerve diameters,[48] reducing the need for wrapping and suturing, which is required for more conformal arrays
The charge transfer properties of the bulk Conductive elastomers (CEs) sheets were characterized by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) (Figure 1c), and cyclic voltammetry (CV) in a saline bath
Summary
There has been a concerted effort to develop new implantable bioelectronic technologies that can be translated toward clinical application. Conducting polymer (CP) composites in particular has been shown to improve charge transfer while mitigating some of the challenges typically associated with thin film CP coatings such as their poor mechanical durability.[26,27,28,29,30,31,32] Both hydrogel and elastomer-based approaches have been successfully used to stabilize CPs into mechanically robust hybrid materials referred to as conductive hydrogels (CHs) and conductive elastomers (CEs) respectively.[26,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42] CHs have been demonstrated to achieve far superior electrochemical performance when compared to conventional metal electrodes,[33,34] their fabrication has been primarily limited to coating of whole devices or individual electrode sites This means that CHs can match the mechanical properties of the nerve tissue and have superior electrochemical properties, they are not processable in a way that can be translated to the production of fully polymeric electrode arrays. Devices are shown to be electrically stable under repeated mechanical stretching, showing the mechanical robustness of devices enabled through use of mechanically similar elastomeric components
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