CEA-Leti, a French research and technology organization, and five partners are combining their expertise to develop a self-powered cardiac pacemaker eight times smaller than current models.
The Heart-Beat Scavenger (HBS) Consortium, which also includes the Sorin Group, TIMA, Cedrat Technologies, Tronics and EASII IC, is targeting an energy self-sufficient device that harvests mechanical energy from the movements of the heart, eliminating the need for batteries and post-implant surgeries to replace them.
A longer-term goal of the project is to reduce healthcare expenditures. Heart failure represents one of the biggest public-health costs today in Europe and the United States.
Technological advances in miniaturizing and cutting the power consumption of electronic components, as well as the advent of energy-harvesting devices, have opened the way to new self-powered implants that significantly improve patient comfort and lower cost, particularly by reducing the number of post-implant surgeries required. These devices constitute a new market for active implantable medical devices (AIMDs) for treating or diagnosing heart diseases.
Financed by the Minalogic competitive cluster in Grenoble, the HBS project goals include:
- Developing a self-powering pacemaker by harvesting the mechanical energy produced by the movements of the heart and eliminating the need for batteries that must be replaced every six to 10 years.
- Reducing the size of a cardiac pacemaker by a factor of eight, from 8 cm3 to 1 cm3. This reduction will make it possible to attach the pacemaker directly to the epicardium, eliminating the need for intravenous introduction of cardiac probes.
Leti is responsible for the mechanical energy-harvesting unit for the prototype, and for designing and creating its capacitance-conversion system. The Sorin Group is positioning itself in the AIMDs market in Europe and globally and hopes to create jobs in the Grenoble region.
Source: CEA-Leti
Top image: Healthy Heart Meditation
For more read : Energy Harvesting and Storage for Electronic Devices 2010-2020
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on 18 - 19 Sep 2019 at Tokyo, Japan hosted by IDTechEx.
on 18 - 19 Sep 2019 at Tokyo, Japan hosted by IDTechEx.