A new prosthetic device for full bladder control

Abstract

In order to restore a normal bladder function for patients with spinal-cord injuries, a very versatile eight-channel implantable urinary prosthesis is designed and implemented. The main application of the device is the stimulation of particular nerves in the sacral roots. The intensity, the format and the timing of the current pulses available at the channel outputs are easily programmable. Those parameters are received transdermally by the implanted device in 13-bit blocks. The information is either loaded into internal registers for immediate processing or stored in an external implantable memory for a deferred processing.