Dissertation Title: Wireless Powered Micro-implantable Electrical Stimulation Devices and Treatment Methods for Urinary Incontinence
Date: 2026/05/13 – 2026/05/13
Dissertation Title: Wireless Powered Micro-implantable Electrical Stimulation Devices and Treatment Methods for Urinary Incontinence
Speaker: Tianxiang Zheng, Ph.D. candidate at SJTU Global College
Time: May 13 from 4:00-5:30 p.m., 2026 (Beijing Time)
Location: Room 503, Longbin Building
Abstract
Urinary incontinence is a common urinary system disease that seriously affects patients’ quality of life. Mixed urinary incontinence (MUI) involves both urgency and stress dysfunctions, with complex pathological mechanisms, and a lack of unified and effective clinical diagnosis and treatment strategies for a long time. State-of-the-art electrostimulation therapies predominantly rely on sacral neuromodulation (SNM) for urge-predominant symptoms, which requires bulky implantable pulse generators (~3 cm³) with high clinical costs (>$10,000) and operates through long neural pathways. In contrast, stress urinary incontinence is largely treated using mechanical or surgical interventions that fail to restore sphincter neuromuscular function. These limitations motivate a compact, mechanism-driven, and long-term implantable solution capable of addressing multiple pathological components of urinary incontinence.
This dissertation presents a wireless-powered implantable programmable electrical stimulation system for urethral sphincter modulation (WIPES) and its application to MUI therapy. The system adopts a soft, adhesive-patch-like implant architecture that integrates wireless power reception and tunable pulse generation, enabling long-term, on-demand stimulation with a substantially reduced footprint (<0.3 cm³) and weight (<0.9 g). The engineering foundation is established through a magnetic-coupling WPT framework tailored for implantable stimulators and a robustness-oriented power delivery strategy that remains effective under in vivo position and orientation uncertainty. Two transferable methodologies are extracted from this work: (1) a WPT methodology for flexible implants operating under deformation and multi-DoFs pose variability, and (2) a proximal, site-specific electrostimulation therapy methodology for MUI that targets the urethral sphincter to bypass long neural loops.
Three core contributions are demonstrated. First, a quantified receiver-coil design rule is identified for thin implantable receivers, where circular coils maintain〖 η〗_coil>84% at 𝑁≤10 and 𝑤:𝑠≥1.5, with 𝑄>120. Second, a position- and orientation-aware transmitter-array architecture enables workspace-level robustness by sustaining stimulation-ready power delivery (P_rx≥P_th) throughout a 20-cm cubic workspace under multi-DoF pose variations. Third, comprehensive biological validation is provided using disease-specific rat models established under identical conditions, where WIPES achieves average alleviation rates of 90.62% in urge urinary incontinence (UUI) and 97.92% in stress urinary incontinence (SUI) based on voiding frequency and volume metrics, supported by histological and immunofluorescence evidence of neuromodulatory and neuromuscular remodeling.
Overall, this dissertation advances wireless-powered implantable stimulation by combining robustness-oriented WPT engineering with mechanism-driven, proximal neuromodulation for MUI. The proposed platform and design methodologies provide a compact and clinically relevant pathway toward long-term, precise treatment of mixed or diagnostically uncertain urinary incontinence, with strong potential for translation to broader implantable bioelectronic therapies.