Sustainable Pacemaker Research Accelerates

One of the great "meta" areas of investigation for the scientific community is how to attain greater efficiency in sustainable energy creation and storage, from solar power arrays to car batteries to batteries for mobile phones and laptops. To the quest for greater sustainability in these industries one can add cardiac pacemakers, and one pioneer of the technology says it could be ready for trials sooner rather than later. "It's not far," M. Amin Karami, PhD, director of the Intelligent Dynamic Energy and Sensing Systems Lab at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said. "We can have the technology ready for animal tests and maybe even for human trials, in two years." Karami supervised work by UB doctoral student Hooman Ansari, in which Ansari and colleagues recently created a piezoelectric energy harvester that converts the heart’s vibrational energy into electricity. The work, which was published in Smart Materials and Structures and the Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures, is but one of several recently published experiments that illustrate the overall quest for sustainable systems has reached critical mass in cardiac device research. In fact, Karami came to the field through his earlier work on larger-scale energy harvesting systems, in aviation and bridge safety in particular. In addition to the UB work, other recent advances include: A project led by University of Connecticut researcher Islam Mosa. Mosa was exploring the suitability of a tin...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Implants Source Type: news