Battery-free pacemaker is powered by the heart

A REVOLUTIONARY battery-free pacemaker that harvests energy from heartbeats could help tens of thousands of patients.

Pacemakers – electronic devices that correct irregular heart rhythms – normally have to have their batteries changed every few years.

But the new device works by creating electricity from the heart’s own movement, making an invasive operation to change the power packs unnecessary. With each beat of the heart, more electricity is produced to power the pacemaker.

More than 500,000 people in Britain have pacemakers, which are about the size of a matchbox and are implanted in the chest. At least half of these will require at least one operation to replace the battery.

The prototype of the battery-free pacemaker was developed by American and Chinese scientists led by Dr Zhong Lin Wang, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. The team’s ‘symbiotic cardiac pacemaker’ has been tested on pigs because their hearts are about the same size as those of humans.

The tests, described in the journal Nature Communications, showed that the harvested energy was higher than the minimum needed for a human pacemaker, which suggests the device would have sufficient power to operate in humans.

But it could be some years before it is ready to be implanted safely into humans. In addition, putting it into the body requires a more invasive operation, because it has to be attached to the heart muscle during open heart surgery.

Commenting on the research, Tim Chico, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Sheffield, said: ‘The study results are very encouraging but there is a lot of work to be done before it might be used in humans.’