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A Piezoelectric Pacemaker That Is Powered By Your Heartbeat
MrSeb writes "Engineers at the University of Michigan have created a pacemaker that is powered by the beating of your heart — no batteries required. The technology behind this new infinite-duration pacemaker is piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity is is literally 'pressure electricity,' and it relates to certain materials that generate tiny amounts of electricity when deformed by an external force — which, in the case of the perpetual pacemaker, the vibrations in your chest as your heart pumps blood around your body. Piezoelectric devices generate very small amounts of power — on the order of tens of milliwatts — but it turns out that pacemakers require very little power. In testing, the researchers' energy harvester generated 10 times the required the power to keep a pacemaker firing. Currently, pacemakers are battery powered — and the battery generally need to be replaced every few years, which requires surgery. According M. Amin Karami, the lead researcher, 'Many of the patients are children who live with pacemakers for many years,' he said. 'You can imagine how many operations they are spared if this new technology is implemented.' This piezoelectric energy harvester is about half the size of a conventional battery, too, which is presumably a good thing."
No, the device does not violate conservation of energy.
Anyways, nice technology. I hope this really works; so much awesome technology seems to go out as a puff of vaporware.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
YO DAWG! I heard you like keeping your heart beating so I made you a pacemaker that beats your heart when your heart beats!
The beating of our hearts is the only sa-ound
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's the first thing I thought of. I'd assume it follows the same basic concept.
Just to be clear the replacement surgery on a pacemaker is almost always done on an outpatient basis with local anesthetic.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
...it's already on phones. why not just tell the patient to wave their cell phone's powermat over their pacemaker for a couple minutes?
.
It's probably not a "defibrillator" type of heart-restarter in case the heart starts fibrillating: defibrillators require too much power in order to be able to "jump start" the heart. (At least I think that's the kind Cheney got). If it's just an automaticity regulator, than a piezo-electric harvester with a good-internal-rechargeable battery / capacitor system might be good for a long time. Don't kids need a redo-surgery as their bodies grow, though?
So when my heart skips a beat, it will actually skip quite a few? Sounds great, screw testing. Wire me up!
As long as your heart keeps beating... your heart will keep beating?
If you had to replace the battery in a car every time it ran out it would be painfull, thankfully someone invented the alternator that charges said battery when the car is running. When the car stops it is fully charged. Glad to see someones thinking again.
Now, what if we pop a high efficiency solar panel on to their weak hearted bold spot????
Back in 1989 when I was doing my masters one of my classmates had this as her project. No hardware, just some conceptual studies, literature survey and a project report.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Some possible repercussions from long-lasting pacemakers:
* Time to sell stock in pacemaker battery companies?
* More seriously, a pacemaker can keep you alive long after the time you might wish you were dead already. Here's an excellent article about a senior who was effectively tricked into getting a pacemaker, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html?pagewanted=all It kept his heart beating for years after dementia took away all his quality of life.
right?
I don't know if straight pacemakers are all that common. My late wife had a pacemaker that was also a defribulater that gives quite a jolt if the heart tries to stop beating. Even thirty minutes after death that thing was still firing away in her chest.
As long as my tissues can secrete and pump around any kind of fluid - I want to be kept alive.
And fuck your stock in battery companies too.
I'd say fuck the horse you rode in on too, but I'm not into that thing.
But it's OK. We'll look around, we'll find someone to fuck your horse for you.
Now fuck off and go die somewhere before your quality of life gets taken away if your beer gets warm while your food goes cold.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually the device is powered by your metabolism in the end so no it does not violate thermodynamics. It is like the watches that collect energy as your wrist moves. The interesting question would be if the increased energy demand stresses the heart significantly to warrant concern.
Are you thinking the pacemaker actually runs the heart? All it does is tell the heart when to beat. Think of it as a metronome that gets its energy from the vibrational energy of the rest of the orchestra.
dom
STFU, you don't have a clue
Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
It's like using the vibrations of passing four locomotive coal trains to charge the battery that drives the signal lights, and it's a very busy track with a lot of passing large trains but without much signalling going on.
Just signals to control traffic, no HUGE battery reserve to run a locomotive starter motor.
So in other words, a pacemaker and not a crashcart defibrilator, and having the constraint that no battery is allowed at all is not reasonable. It could be seen as deliberately adding a constraint for no reason other than making something fail, but you are not doing that are you? That would be childish and pointless.
Nah, I guess they wouldn't want to operate on you; they'd rather be the OEM that makes you in the first place: humans 2.0, or since it's apple, iHumans 2.0, now with improved resolution and Retina (TM by apple don't use it it's our phrase) vision capable Retinas in each eye!
Heartbeat powered pacemaker is as useful as a solar powered flashlight.
You should read The Zen Gun. Then you know that a single human being is enough to spread around the whole room, living and seeing with the eyes at the opposite walls.
Sounds kinda optimistic to me.
Remember that this device gets wired directly into the heart. It doesn't have to go through a business suit, dry skin, 6 inches of fat, and an inch of bone.
This device is wired directly into the heart. A normal defibrillator needs to zap right through a business suit, dry skin, 6 inches of fat, an inch of bone, and more. The difference is huge.
Will this allow for enough power to encrypt the wireless connection these things have?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
And it doesn't tell the heart when to beat all the time, either. My father's pacemaker works something like 3% of the time only, at least that's what they told him last time he went for the pacemaker check up.
Sounds to me like another cog in the wheels of the zombie apocalypse.