A versatile fast-development platform applied to closed-loop diaphragmatic pacing

People with cervical spinal cord injury have partial or complete loss of ventilatory control and require ventilator assist. Open-loop diaphragmatic pacing can be utilized to provide this assist. A closed-loop diaphragmatic pacing system could overcome the drawbacks for manual titration of the stimulation and respond to changing ventilatory requirements. We have developed a versatile custom hardware platform dubbed “Multimed” for biosignal acquisition and parallel real-time computation, data display and storage. We have also developed a new rodent model for diaphragmatic pacing. Using these we illustrate, to our knowledge for the first-time, the successful ability to perform respiratory flow-phase triggered closed-loop diaphragmatic stimulation with resultant changes in respiratory flow and tidal volume.