Design and Simulation of a Wireless Based Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator for Pain Control
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Date
2016-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Pain is general term for unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. For this reason, pain control and management is an important welfare concern even in routine management procedures of patients. The most widely used controls for pain at the present time are narcotic treatments. Recently, electrical nerve stimulation has emerged as a new mechanism for pain control that replace the narcotics which is a mechanism of injecting electrical impulse to the surface of the human body that suppressed the pain, but almost all developed systems are wired based and are not user friendly. Whereas, the narcotics most commonly prescribed have not only had a number of worrisome side effects, but also the cost is high and not affordable by most of the patients specifically in developing countries.
In this thesis a wireless programmable microcontroller based transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator has been designed and simulated, and the designed system gives a chance to the user to choose from the different types of stimulation parameters, like amplitude, frequency, pulse width, and duration, for how long the stimulation should be maintained. To achieve the specific advantages, the designed system uses eight levels of frequency, six levels of pulse-width, and four selectable stages which has been tested on ISIS PROTEUS DESIGN SUIT software, and for the programming parts of the design, mikro C PRO software for PIC language which is a popular high-level C programming language and Arduino Programming Language Software which is a simplified version of C/C++ has been accustomed. In summary, the proposed system gives different conditions of operations for the subject body to control the pain and overcome the drawbacks of the narcotics. It is flexible and user-friendly compared to the already built transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) systems that are available on related literatures and market.
Keywords - Pain, Pain control and management, Wireless microcontroller based stimulation, Electrical nerve stimulation, and Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) system.
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Keywords
Pain; Pain control and management; Wireless microcontroller based stimulation; Electrical nerve stimulation; and Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) system