Abstract:
Developing new technologies to better and more effectively aid people with disabilities is one of the major challenges that scientists and engineers aspire to undertake in the 21st century. There are 250 million people with disabling hearing and 180 million with visual impairments in the world. Paralysis, one of the most common debilitating results of severe damage to the nervous system, particularly among young adults, accounts for hundreds of thousands of new cases each year due to traffic accidents, acts of violence, or falls. Increased life expectancy has resulted in a growing number of individuals suffering from neurological diseases such as stroke, Parkinson's, musculosclerosis, and Alzheimer's. Advanced implantable microsystems have allowed the application of integrated microelectronics to the human nervous system, and reached a level of scientific maturity that can produce enormous benefits to patients. These devices have made possible the development of neuroprosthetic devices that are aimed at restoring sensory, motor, and cognitive functions lost through injury or disease. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been helped by neuroprosthetic devices such as cochlear implants that restore hearing to the deaf, functional electrical stimulators that help the paralyzed move, deep brain stimulators that treat neurological movement disorders, and spinal cord stimulators that relieve those in chronic pain. There are also a group of devices, known as assistive technologies that often pursue noninvasive approaches in resolving the same type of problems to help improve their users' quality of life. In this talk I will highlight the recent advancements in developing custom integrated circuits and microsystems for wireless interfacing with the central and peripheral nervous systems for various sensory and rehabilitation applications. I will demonstrate some of the latest achievements at the GT-Bionics lab in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Biography:
Maysam Ghovanloo received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1994 and the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1997. He also received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI in 2003 and 2004, respectively. His Ph.D. research was on developing a modular wireless microsystem for Micromachined neural stimulating microprobes. In December 1998 he founded Sabz-Negar Rayaneh Co. Ltd., Tehran, Iran, to manufacture physiology and pharmacology research laboratory instruments. In the summer of 2002, he was with the Advanced Bionics Inc., Sylmar, CA, working on the design and development of spinal-cord stimulators. From 2004 to 2007 he was an assistant professor at the Department of ECE in the North Carolina State University, Raleigh. In June 2007 he joined the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, where he is currently an assistant professor at the School of ECE and the founding director of the GT-Bionics laboratory. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II. He has been a member of the technical program committee for the IEEE Midwest Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), and Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) conferences. He has organized special sessions on Advanced Neuroengineering Circuits & Microsystems at the ISCAS'07 and ISCAS'08, as well as Modern Assistive Technologies at the 29th IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS'07) conferences. He has also served as a technical reviewer for major IEEE and IoP journals in the areas of circuits, systems, and biomedical engineering. Dr. Ghovanloo holds the ON Semiconductor junior faculty chair. He has received awards in the operational category of the 40th and 41st DAC/ISSCC student design contest in 2003 and 2004, respectively. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and IEEE Solid-State Circuits, Circuits and Systems, and Engineering in Medicine and Biology societies.