Wireless Headstage for Neural Prosthetics

Abstract

The continuous monitoring of electrical brain activity with implanted electrodes is essential for understanding the neural substrates of many physiological and pathological brain functions. Although this is done in some patients before undergoing surgical treatment, such recordings are extremely difficult in experimental animals, particularly in small rodents. The wires from the implanted electrodes restrain and interfere with the natural behavior of the animals. Consequently, it has been impossible to correlate truly normal behavior with neuronal activity. In addition, it would be ideal if brain activity could be monitored while animals live in a natural and enriched environment. A neural prosthetic device is comprised of a hardware system that records neural activity from the brain and then decodes it into control signals that in turn can be used to move robotic devices or muscles. Today's neural prosthetic devices typically use tethered headstage connections that interface the brain headstage electronics to the remote spike sorting processors located at the controlled devices. In this paper we present the circuits, layouts and test data for a multi-channel wireless headstage system which includes the headstage transmitter and receiver components