I think it is an interesting article. I'm surprised no one else has bothered to comment. If you were to mention, however briefly, National Health Care, or some synonym therof, you would get plenty of comments - largely venomous.
Your article caught my eye as I have just had a pacemaker fitted. However, I am assured that the battery could last 10 years, so replacement is not an immediate concern.
My first reaction was that this sounds a bit like a perpetual motion machine. But on further thought I realized that the pacemaker only triggers the heart muscles to contract, it does not provide the energy. The energy for muscle contraction is provided by ATP, the energy currency of the cell.
Dr. Arthur R. Berg
Forget having to replace batteries… your own beating heart may generate enough electricity to power a pacemaker, Reuters reports.
In order to help the heart maintain a normal heartbeat, conventional implanted devices that send electrical impulses have to be replaced every five years or so when their batteries run out. This usually requires repeated surgeries.
This new energy-harvesting device runs on piezoelectricity — the electrical charge generated from motion. Piezoelectric materials generate an electric charge when their shape is changed, BBC explains, and they’re used in microphones, for example, to convert vibrations into an electrical signal.
In order to use the movement of the heart as a source of electricity, researchers led by M. Amin Karami from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, first measured heartbeat-induced vibrations in the chest. Then they used a ‘shaker’ to reproduce these vibrations in the lab.
When these simulated heartbeats were connected to the prototype cardiac energy harvester, it generated more than 10 times the power required by modern pacemakers.
The device is about half the size of batteries being used in pacemakers and includes a self-powering back-up capacitor. The researchers are now working to integrate the system into a pacemaker, though it could also be used to power implantable defibrillators.
The work was presented at the scientific meeting of the American Heart Association in Los Angeles this week.
[Via Reuters, BBC]
Image by Manu_H via Flickr
