Slashdot Mirror


In France, a Second Patient Receives Permanent Artificial Heart

Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One of the most important goals of transhumanist medicine—possessing a perfectly healthy heart—has so far remained elusive. This week, we came a step closer when for the second time ever, a French company implanted a permanent artificial heart in a patient. More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them. We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons. The patient who received the first of these hearts, though he survived for 76 days, died after the heart "stopped after a short circuit, although the exact reasons behind the death were still unknown."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Wifi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    With wifi/bluetooth capability I feel like there's not anything that could possibly go wrong. It will be important to have it connect to the cloud in order to retrieve heart rate profiles for the day.

    1. Re:Wifi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You may skip this ad and restart your heart in 5s.

  2. WIFI-Enabled Vital Organs?!?! by deathcloset · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I strongly believe that in the not too distant future the number 1 thing that people will wonder why we were so dumb as to not notice it was a horrible idea was having every goddamn thing connected and communicating.

    ROM people. ROM!!! (the second ROM was written in allcaps for emphasis)

    You can't remotely exploit a device without a network or public interface.

    We're so obsessed with connectivity and networks these days that we are blinded to the negatives of all this connectivity - thinking they are just problems of the system to be resolved rather than inherent aspects of the system which can not be gotten rid of.

    Alrighty rant(off);
    v Now since, like you, I love the internet and connected thingymabobs somebody please reply and give some really good counterarguments against my thinking that IP addresses+Organs is a bad idea.

  3. Re:This isn't supposed to happen... by qbast · · Score: 5, Funny

    They are trying to reproduce the bug.

  4. Permanant vs temporary by belthize · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Permanence has a pretty specific meaning here. It says nothing of duration, only that it's the last.

    Getting a permanent heart that lasts 76 days is not nearly as enticing as getting a temporary heart that lasts 2 years.