Long-term cortical recordings with microactuated microelectrodes

Current microelectrode array technologies often fail over a period of time presumably due to brain tissue reaction and micromotion around the implant site. We report here long-term cortical recordings from our novel microactuated microelectrode array technology. Our technology uses electro-thermal microactuators to move each of the three highly doped thin (~4mum thick) polysilicon microelectrodes in the array. Multi-unit activity in n=2 rodents was monitored for a period of over 12 weeks. High-quality multi-unit data with noise levels less than 10 muV peak-to-peak and signal levels ranging from 100 muV to 5 mV (peak-to-peak) were obtained over the entire duration of study. The results of this study demonstrate the long-term recording capability of the microactuated microelectrodes in rodent models.