Cochlear implant wireless power transfer system design for high efficiency and link gain stability using a proposed stagger tuning method

Abstract

In recent years, wireless power transfer (WPT) technology is becoming an increasingly important part of the various applications because of its safety. Especially, medical implant devices such as a cochlear implant are one of the typical application of the WPT technology. Because of the individual body differences, however, the coupling coefficient of the WPT system can be changed. Therefore, the coupling coefficient-insensitivity is very important design issue.In this paper, we propose an stagger tuning method of a cochlear implant WPT system. The proposed method makes the cochlear implant WPT system stable at the link gain regardless of the coupling coefficient. In addition, the design can be optimized ?vith consideration of the power transfer efficiency (PTE) of the WPT system. We verified that the proposed method increased the PTE of the cochlear implant WPT system by 9 % by mathematical calculation.