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StarSwitch: Enhancing Electrode Placement for Neurostimulation
- Program: Biomedical Engineering
- Course: EN.580.X12 BME Design Team
- Year: 2026
Project Description:
1 in 5 adults live with chronic pain in the United States. Current frontline treatments used to provide pain relief are insufficient for 50% of chronic patients. Scrambler therapy is a new electrical stimulation solution that uses variable nonlinear waveforms to reduce overactivation of nerve fibers responsible for chronic pain. However, placement of electrodes during treatment is heavily reliant on trial-and-error. 33% of each session is spent on electrode placement, reducing actual treatment time. Consequently, patients do not experience pain relief and are wasting time on an inefficient solution. This is where the StarSwitch steps in: our solution provides a novel electrode array system that allows clinicians to switch between stimulation sites within 0.5 seconds. Our solution has potential to save up to 20 minutes in electrode placement per session, eventually resulting in overall improvements in treatment scores and sustained pain relief for patients.
Project Photo:
Scrambler therapy is a new neurostimulation therapy that has been shown to provide relief to chronic pain patients but faces issues in operability and electrode placement. The StarSwitch is an electrode array solution that allows clinicians to quickly switch between stimulation sites to improve the efficacy of scrambler therapy for chronic pain.
