What do you know about Electrical Stimuation?

A simple model that shows how FES (i.e. Functional Electrical Stimulation) works.

"In the last few years many medical devices that take advantage of electrical stimulation have been developed ( e.g. in the treatment of nervous system injury ) and nowadays a lot of experimentation is focused on application oriented to restore motor functionality. We will now go through a brief introduction which covers the physiology used in the model.

First of all we consider one of the most important cell with active behaviour: the neuron. In the human body there are more than 100 billion neurons which communicate with other cells through ""wires"" called axons. The way the axons carry information from one cell to another is by transmitting ionic currents thanks to a phenomenon known as the ""action potential"" (A.P.). Neurons communicate to each other (and with other cells) by sending action potentials along their axons, and they do that a lot: one neuron may be connected to more than hundreds of thousands of other neurons. The peculiar aspect of the action potential, which gives such importance to the phenomenon, is that it behaves as an on-off mechanism: either it starts or it doesn't, and it always has the same form. This allows neurons to communicate in a standardized and common ""language"" and gives us a reason to study and formalize the phenomenon."