A Portable, Arbitrary Waveform, Multichannel Constant Current Electrotactile Stimulator

Int IEEE EMBS Conf Neural Eng. 2017 May:2017:300-303. doi: 10.1109/NER.2017.8008350. Epub 2017 Aug 15.

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and performance of a portable, arbitrary waveform, multichannel constant current electrotactile stimulator that costs less than $30 in components. The stimulator consists of a stimulation controller and power supply that are less than half the size of a credit card and can produce ±15 mA at ±150 V. The design is easily extensible to multiple independent channels that can receive an arbitrary waveform input from a digital-to-analog converter, drawing only 0.9 W/channel (lasting 4-5 hours upon continuous stimulation using a 9 V battery). Finally, we compare the performance of our stimulator to similar stimulators both commercially available and developed in research.