The Biofeedback Therapy System Of Female Urinary Incontinence

At present, although the biofeedback technologies have been, to some extent, applied to treat the female urinary incontinence at abroad, they sample EMG using electrodes or sample the constriction intensity of urethral detrusor-sphincter using pressure sensors, and then through the digital signal process, the patients can be prompted consciously to practice the muscular exercises in the form of audio or video. In the aspect of electro-stimulating therapy, a variety of solutions have been studied to obtain the favorable therapeutic effects.This paper comprehensively introduces the pathogenies of the female urinary incontinence, the biofeedback therapy technologies, the electro-therapy and the EMG. Combining with the various foreign methods of treating the urinary incontinence and making full use of the advantages of biofeedback therapy and electro-therapy, the present paper puts forward a biofeedback therapy method combining the detection of EMG with the electro-stimulation therapy. The present system utilizes the biofeedback technologies to analyze and process the EMG sampled from female urethral detrusor-sphincter. According to the results of process, the corresponding dose and frequency of electro-pulse signals will be output to stimulate the urethral detrusor-sphincter to treat the female stress, urgent and mixed urinary incontinence.The hardware of the system involves the EMG amplifier, the stimulator, the digital-analog converter, the analog-digital converter, the USB controller and the PC. Apart from employing the linear optocoupler isolation, this EMG pre-amplifier uses the boost to enhance the CMR and the input swing and reject the industry interference. The amplifier and stimulator share the same electrodes. Through controlling the circuit of the amplifier enabling input and the circuit of the stimulator enabling output, they work harmoniously.The software of the system includes the firmware of MCU, the USB driver and the application software of PC. The firmware of MCU is responsible for sampling the EMG, outputting the stimulating signals and communicating with the PC. The software of PC is responsible for running the system, analyzing and processing the EMG together with generating the stimulating signals according to the stimulation solutions, as well as communicating with the MCU.This system applies the IEMG algorithm to extract the intensity of EMG. This intensity exhibits the linear relation with the constriction intensity. Because this system is a pure-lag linear one, DMC algorithm can be directly applied into this system as a predictive control one and need not to add the extra control structures. Compared with the PID algorithm, the DMC algorithm has the obvious advantages in processing the time-delay objects.