Simulation-Informed Power Budget Estimate of a Fully-Implantable Brain–Computer Interface

This study aims to estimate the maximum power consumption that guarantees a thermally safe operation for a titanium-enclosed chest wall unit (CWU) subcutaneously implanted in the pre-pectoral area. This unit is a central piece of an envisioned fully-implantable bi-directional brain–computer interface (BD-BCI). To this end, we created a thermal simulation model using the finite element method implemented in COMSOL. We also performed a sensitivity analysis to ensure that our predictions were robust against the natural variation of physiological and environmental parameters. Based on this analysis, we predict that the CWU can consume between 378 and 538 mW of power without raising the surrounding tissue’s temperature above the thermal safety threshold of 2  \(^{\circ }\) ${}^{\circ }$ C. This power budget should be sufficient to power all of the CWU’s basic functionalities, which include training the decoder, online decoding, wireless data transmission, and cortical stimulation. This power budget assessment provides an important specification for the design of a CWU—an integral part of a fully-implantable BD-BCI system.