Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer for Periauricular EMG Sensing

Objective

The over 1 million individuals worldwide with significant functional impairment due to spinal cord injury, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Locked-in Syndrome face hardships in interacting with a world constructed for those with functioning musculature innervation. The higher the injury to the spine, via contusion or disease progress, the greater the disconnect from the normative way of operating in the world. Assistive devices that respond to the musculature innervated by the cranial, and more specifically the facial, nerves can ease the burden on these individuals by giving them an additional vector by which to affect the world around them. The cranial nerves include those that humans do not commonly use to express on the modern world. These vestigial nerves provided function to ancestors, but now serve little purpose. One such vestigial musculature innervation are the periauricular muscles which oriented the ear in phylogenetically lower species. Even more significant though, functional innervation of these periauricular muscles remain even after the highest spinal cord injury. By sensing the electromyography (EMG) signal resulting from these vestigial periauricular muscles and relaying that signal to an external controller via a wirelessly powered implanted EMG sensing and backscatter communication device, one can provide exactly this revolutionary additional control vector without sacrificing a single otherwise commonly accessible facial motor control unit. The proposed SWIPT-PEMG will be minimally invasive, of miniscule size, be battery free, can transmit at data rates up to 2Mbps, is extremely low cost, and is predicted to improve SNR by 25 to 40% over existing wearable systems, thus we will provide control without cumbersome electronics of EEG, without the invasive and perilous surgeries of ECOG, and without the massive power demands of both.