Researchers and device developers have been taking aim at many of the shortcomings associated with current pacemakers, and these breakthroughs could usher in a new generation of pacemaker technologies.

For years, pacemaker devices have been an essential technology for patients who struggle with cardiac arrhythmias, but they often come with their own set of problems. Despite their ability to help patients maintain a steady heartbeat, pacemakers require maintenance such as battery replacement and software upgrades to protecting the devices from hackers.

The good news is, many researchers and device developer shave already begun to address some of these issues with the latest in technological developments that aim to usher in a new era of advanced pacemaker devices. In the following slideshow, we take a look at some of the technology advances that are pushing the envelope when it comes to pacemakers.

A team of engineers out of the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) announced in May a new grant from the National Science Foundationto commercialize a new chip that can make lower power electronics like cell phone batteries and pacemaker devices run more efficiently.

The new chip was designed to reduce the amount of power consumption, a feature that will help extend battery life without limiting device functionality. Ruyan Guo, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UTSA and lead developer on the project, said the chip could have a variety of different applications, and it could help medtech devices like pacemakers and defibrillators take a significant leap forward.

A new battery-less, wireless pacemaker was introduced over the summer by researchers from Rice University. It is designed to harvest energy wirelessly from radio-frequency radiation transmitted by an external battery pack. The device was designed to be implanted directly into a patient’s heart, removing the need for wires, known as “leads,” which can create complications with bleeding and infection.

The team has already successfully tested the device in a pig, demonstrating that the new pacemaker could tune the animal’s heart rate from 100 beats per minute all the way up to 172. The frequency of the pacing signals produced by the device can also be adjusted by increasing or decreasing the power transmitted to the device.

One of the largest technological trends at the moment is the increasing interconnectivity between devices, and with that trend comes new risks that need to be addressed. Industry analysts predict that by 2020 most of the 20 billion electronic devices on the market will be interconnected—and among these will be implantable medical devices. Connecting these implantables to the internet will not only improve device functionality, it will also impose hacking risks.

Researchers from the University of Arizona are pioneering a new runtime anomaly detection technology that can expose minuscule changes in the timing of how computations and data are transmitted from the pacemaker to a cardiac data log, exposing the presence of potential malware. These tiny changes in the timing of data transmission would immediately alert a doctor, where steps could be taken remotely to protect the patient.

The next generation of pacemaker technologies could be just around the corner thanks to a new project led by Alain Nogaret from Bath University in the UK. Nogaret’s team has developed physical models capable of predicting neuron behavior and small neural devices that can reverse the effect of heart failure.

The group aims to provide new devices like pacemakers that can provide adaptive therapies for cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure, and other conditions like hypertension that can improve patient care. The idea is to design pacemakers using technologies that can mimic neurons, allowing the device to respond to inputs nonlinearly. The end result will be a new kind of pacemaker that can respond accurately to a patient’s individual needs.

Researchers from Harvard’s school of engineering and applied sciences have created the world’s smallest radio receiver, a technology assembled from atomic-scale defects in pink diamonds. The tiny radio is completely biocompatible, and was designed to withstand harsh environments for medtech applications like a pacemaker.

In the device, electrons are powered by green light emitted from a laser. These electrons then become sensitive to electromagnetic fields, including the waves used in FM radio. The radio is also extremely resilient, as it was created from diamonds, and could have the potential to help power the next generation of wireless pacemaker devices by transmitting electrical pulses without the need for leads.

When considering the future of pacemakers, few ever thought that science would find a way to turn cells into pacemakers themselves. That’s what a team of scientists from the McEwen Center for Regenerative Medicine are trying to do. Their recent work details how human pluripotent stem cells can develop into pacemaker cells in just 21 days, enabling them to regulate heart beats with electrical impulses.

So far the group has tested these pacemaker cells in rats and have found that they can function as a biological pacemaker by triggering the contraction of the heart through electrical impulses. The group hopes that in time, they can develop a biological pacemaker that can be implanted into patients to improve cardiac care.

One of the biggest issues for modern-day pacemakers is the power source. Most pacemakers on the market simply rely on batteries to power the device, which requires surgery to replace. Researchers from the University of Buffalo hope to alleviate the issue through the development of a piezoelectric system that can convert vibrational energy into electricity to power the device — turning the heart into a natural power source.

The technology works to capture vibrational energy generated by each individual beat of the heart, and convert that energy into electricity to power the pacemaker. The new system can keep a pacemaker running at a range of 7 to 700 beats per minute.

Researchers Eugenio Cingolani, MD (left), and Joshua Gold Haber, MD (right), from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute are inching closer to a breakthrough on their new biological pacemaker, designed to treat patients suffering from slow heartbeats. The minimally-invasive technology utilizes gene-therapy to turn the patient’s own normal heart cells into pacemaker cells that can regulate heart function.

Specialized pacemaker cells already occur naturally in the human heart, generating electrical activity that can spread throughout the heart to create rhythmic muscle contractions. Researchers from Cedars-Sinai are working toward delivering a gene directly into a patient’s heart through a minimally-invasive catheter-based procedure that could convert normal heart cells into pacemaker cells to help keep the heart beating normally.

Source: MDDI+Qmed

Discover more:https://www.mddionline.com/node/78446