There has been a growing interest in the use of electrical stimulation as a therapy across diverse medical conditions. Most electroceutical devices use simple waveforms, for example sinusoidal or rectangular biphasic pulses. Clinicians empirically tune the waveform parameters (e.g. amplitude, frequency) without altering the fundamental shape of the stimulus. In this article, we review computational strategies that have been used to optimize the shape of stimulus waveforms in order to improve clinical outcomes, and we discuss potential directions for future exploration.
Keywords: Bioelectronic medicine; Calculus of variations; Electrical stimulation; Optimization algorithms; Stochastic search.