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The Stages of Electrical Stimulation: A History in Seven Turning Points

Over roughly 250 years, therapeutic electrical stimulation has jumped to a new level perhaps seven times, and each jump was made possible by a new technological development. It might have been a way of handling current, storing it, generating it, shaping it, measuring it, timing it, or using it to tune the nervous system rather than drive it, and finally today triggering it from the person's own movement or intention. These are the stages I allude to in the title.

The first stimulator I worked with, as a PhD student in the late 1970s, filled a good part of a laboratory bench and needed someone who understood it standing beside it. The Stim2Go electrical stimulation device I carry to homes or clinics now is the size of my hand. It can be strapped to a client's thigh, senses when they start to move, and is set up from an app on my phone. Both deliver a pulse of current to a nerve. Almost everything else about them has changed.

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