Neural and electromyography PEDOT electrodes for invasive stimulation and recording

Abstract

Implantable biomedical electrodes are widely used for biological signal recording and stimulation, with applications ranging from Parkinson disease treatment to brain machine interfaces. Due to the inherent difficulties associated with these implants, such as the degradation of their performance over time and the risk of causing damage to the surrounding tissues, these electrodes pose tremendous challenges on the materials that are used for their fabrication. Over the past decade, conducting polymers have emerged as one of the most promising family of materials for the realization of highly performant and reliable implantable electrodes, with poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) being one of the most successful. For this application, conducting polymers are typically deposited on metal electrodes, thus forming a coating that offers an electrochemically enhanced and more biocompatible interface for the signal transduction. In this review, we discuss the key aspects of PEDOT-based implantable electrodes for neural signal recording, stimulation and electromyography, offering comprehensive guidelines on their fabrication and characterization.