Doctors from Switzerland have created an autonomous pacemaker

A number of models of mechanical watches are equipped with an automatic winding mechanism. This is very convenient for owners of watches technology, which allows you to forget about the need to plant their chronometers once a day or so. The technology itself is far from new - it is about 250 years old. As it turned out, the principle of automatic winding can be used to create pacemakers (pacemakers) - in this case they become completely autonomous, an external source of energy is not needed.

Developers from the Berne University Hospital in Switzerland have been able to create a technology that allows the pacemaker to receive the energy generated by the pulsations of the heart muscle. According to experts, the generated electricity is enough to completely abandon the use of an external source of electricity - the pacemaker becomes autonomous.

In the usual case, the cardiac pacemakers are placed next to the pectoral muscle, giving electrical signals to the heart. The main task of the pacemaker is to maintain or impose a heart rate on a patient whose heart beats insufficiently often, or there is an electrophysiological disconnection between the atria and the ventricles (atrioventricular block).
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In order to supply such a device with electricity, it is equipped with batteries that must be replaced regularly. This requires additional intrusive intervention. A "self-winding" pacemaker can remain in the human body for many years without the need for regular operations to remove the stimulator and replace its batteries. The method of obtaining energy, developed by scientists, can be used in other implantable medical systems that also use batteries.

So far, the technology has passed only the technical stage of testing, its creators have proved the very possibility of creating an autonomous pacemaker. In order for the technology to be used in the creation of pacemakers, specialists should conduct a long-term assessment of the impact of such systems on heart function. Andreas Haberlin, one of the developers, claims that fluid will accumulate around the device, while the surrounding areas will, on the contrary, experience a shortage of interstitial fluid. Nevertheless, he is convinced that the human body will be able to cope with this problem on its own, although scars will remain at the implantation site of the sensor and its “generator”. There is also a chance that the heart tissue at the implant implantation site will shrink somewhat worse than the “free” tissues of the unused areas.


Prototype of the mechanism of energy generation during heartbeat pulsation

Now scientists are going to test the system on animals in order to study the medium and long-term effect of an autonomous pacemaker on the organism of living beings. The results of the work are expected to be received within three years.

As for the mechanical watches with the car factory, they start up from the movements of the wrists of the owner. The basis of the mechanism of the automobile plant is the so-called sector - a metal half-disk, the center of gravity of which is shifted to the edge. Masters place such a disk on a special support that allows the disk to rotate completely freely in different directions. Bearing and gears transfer the energy of rotation of the disk to the spring.

A similar principle is involved in the energy generator for a pacemaker. Here, the oscillations of the heart wall also provide the movement of a special load. With the help of mathematical modeling, scientists have clarified the features of the system and its structural elements. To test the idea, scientists ordered a watch with a car factory from the company ETA, dismantled them, examining the mechanism itself. After that, they replaced the disk with their own, made of platinum (thanks to which it can be made smaller in size but heavier) and added a microgenerator from a quartz watch in order to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy.

Of course, directly, without protective mechanisms, such a pacemaker can not work. A spare battery is required, which will supply the rhythm driver with energy if something happens to the power generation mechanism. The results of their work, scientists presented in the article .

There are other ways to generate energy using different systems of the human body. For example, colleagues of this group of scientists, also from Bern, developed a miniature turbine that generates a current when blood moves in vessels. There are also developments that allow to obtain energy in the inner ear of a person or to collect "energy harvest" from different organs using piezoelectric materials .

“There are always alternative ways to achieve an important goal, and I think that we all have the same motivation - to replace the batteries in implantable medical devices,” said Haberlin.