Biomedical-cells manipulation via electrical stimulation has been widely used in both commercial and research applications. Electrical stimulation can trigger intracellular signal paths and affect the intracellular microenvironment resulting in cell proliferation, differentiation, and migration. Profile of cells can be modified by applying external electric parameters such as current, voltage, waveform, and frequency. Analyzing cell impedance can indicate the cell profile change due to the stimulation. Much work has been done to develop the optimal stimulation patterns and the observation methods for various cell types, however, most of the stimulators are bulky, costly, and difficult to set up which increases experimental time and cost.

A low production cost, portable, user-friendly, a...[ Read more ]

Biomedical-cells manipulation via electrical stimulation has been widely used in both commercial and research applications. Electrical stimulation can trigger intracellular signal paths and affect the intracellular microenvironment resulting in cell proliferation, differentiation, and migration. Profile of cells can be modified by applying external electric parameters such as current, voltage, waveform, and frequency. Analyzing cell impedance can indicate the cell profile change due to the stimulation. Much work has been done to develop the optimal stimulation patterns and the observation methods for various cell types, however, most of the stimulators are bulky, costly, and difficult to set up which increases experimental time and cost.

A low production cost, portable, user-friendly, and highly configurable Electrical Stimulator (ES) with an impedance analyzer was designed, implemented, and measured in this work. It can generate various electrical stimulation parameters for cell profile analyses using a compact device, and as a result, further accelerates the development cycles in tissue engineering.