A Prototype Development of Personal Low-frequency Stimulator with Characteristic Analysis

개인용 저주파 자극기의 특성분석 및 Prototype개발

A personal low-frequency stimulator is a portable device to relax muscle pains of a person. The stimulator generates combined low-frequency pulses to be applied to pads attached to painful muscles. This paper reports a development of such device with its characteristic analyses. The major components of our stimulator are MCU, high-voltage generating circuit part, high-voltage switching circuit part, input switch part and display unit. High-voltage generating circuit is designed by using a boost converter circuit and allows user control of the output voltage. High-voltage switching circuit, controlled by MCU, generates output voltage to be applied to pads. Input switch part is composed of power supply, intensity selection, mode selection and memory. Display unit adopts a text LCD module to display modes, Intensity, output frequency and user set-up time. Our designed safety circuit, to protect human body from possible electric shock, slowly increases the output voltage to the selected output intensity. It continuously checks the output pulse shape and disable the output when dangerous pulses are detected. This paper also shows some experimental results.