Scientists Developed Battery-less Pacemaker, Powered By Heartbeats

In order to balance the heart-beat of an imbalanced heart patient, we use pacemaker. An artificial pacemaker (heart has also a pacemaker which is by-born and natural) is used to maintain an adequate heart beating rate through electrical impulses if the heart is not beating rhythmically or there’s a block in the heart’s electrical conduction system. But as the pacemaker is artificial, so it can’t run without batteries. But now, scientists have developed a new pacemaker that doesn’t need batteries and powers the patient’s heart.


Battery-less pacemaker

A cardiac pacemaker never runs out of batteries. And when the batteries get down, the patient has to go through surgery to get a replacement. Earlier we reported that scientists had created a pacemaker that could charge itself from heartbeat vibrations. That means, this pacemaker had batteries and it could recharge itself by converting the vibrations from the heartbeats to electrical energy. But some other scientists were trying to create battery-less pacemaker and finally they did it.

Scientists in Switzerland have developed a new cardiac pacemaker that doesn’t need batteries – it’s powered entirely by the motion of the patient’s own heart. This new pacemaker works like a mechanical wristwatch and draws all its power from the beating of the patient’s heart.

Scientists have presented their new pacemaker at the 2014 European Society of Cardiology Congress last week. There the team said that the system can so far produce 52 microwatts of power when attached to the heart of a live 60-kilogram pig, which is well above the requirements for a human pacemaker – about 10 microwatts.

Before the scientists send it out to market, they are now working on making their device smaller and more efficient in both its energy-harvesting and heart-motion-detecting capacities.

Source: European Society of Cardiology (ESC)
Thanks To: Science Alert

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Anatol

Anatol Rahman is the Editor at TheTechJournal. He loves complicated machineries, and crazy about robot and space. He likes cycling. Before joining TheTechJournal team, he worked in the telemarketing industry. You can catch him on Google+.

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