MicroTransponder Inc. has raised $3.05 million to begin clinical trials of a neurostimulation medical device that aims to help people who have a constant ringing in their ears, along with stroke patients and those with chronic pain.

The investment in the Dallas company was led by Green Park & Golf Ventures, a North Texas health care investment concern, and included a number of wealthy individuals, including several practicing physicians.

The $3.05 million included a matching warrant provision allowing investors to put another $4.32 million intoMicroTransponder at a future point should they elect to do so.

Later this year, a clinical trial of MicroTransponder’s device is slated to begin. That trial, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, will examine MicroTransponder’s therapy for the treatment of Tinnitus, or a constant ringing in the ears.

As many as 2 million Americans suffer from debilitating Tinnitus, according to the American Tinnitus Association.

That 2 million number includes 850,000 military veterans. The Veterans Administration spends over $1.6 billion annually in related disability payments.

In addition to Tinnitus, MicroTransponder’s system is aimed at treating stroke victims and those who suffer from chronic pain.

One of MicroTransponder’s treatment systems, called Vivistim, aims to help stroke patients regain movement they may have lost in their upper limbs.

This Cyborg is now a Global figure – but not for the reason he wanted to be.

Fig 1: Pistorius competes in the semifinals of the able-bodied men’s 400m at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu in South Korea.

Take the case of Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius is a world-class track athlete and a double below-knee amputee. Ossur Corporate, one of the leading innovators in hi-tech lower-limb devices, supplies the South African athlete with his carbon fiber running blades — called the Flex Foot Cheetah. Their leg replacements are modeled after a cheetah’s rear limbs. However, due to the bipedal nature of human beings, compromises had to be made for stability and esthetics. They use high-yield synthetic extensors and flexors which allows the user to jump higher and run faster. Outputs don’t yet reach Olympic levels for speed and height, since the legs must be functional in everyday life and haven’t been created with a single purpose in mind. They do, nonetheless, offer more than acceptable performances, by allowing its user to run at a top speed of 27 km/h (compared to the 36 km/h of unaugmented Olympic sprinters) and jump a maximum height of 3m (3.43m Olympic record).The legs even feature small pockets of air to help with buoyancy.

In early 2008, Pistorius, aka “Blade Runner”, was ruled ineligible to compete in the 2008 Summer Olympics because his prosthetic limbs were said to give him an unfair advantage over runners who had ankles. One researcher found that his limbs used twenty-five percent less energy than those of an able-bodied runner moving at the same speed. The ruling was overturned on appeal. His personal best of 45.07 seconds for the season in the 400m was the 15^th fastest in the world at the time

Current technology uses these components to integrate the prosthetic device into the body’s function:

 1. Biosensors detect electrical signals from the body’s neuro-muscular system and relay the data to the controller. This is used in myoelectric prosthesis.

2. Mechanical sensors process aspects affecting the device (e.g., limb position, applied force, load) and relay this information to the biosensor or controller. Examples include force meters and accelerometers.

3. The controller is responsible for monitoring and controlling of the movements of the prosthetic device.

4. An actuator is in effect the ‘muscle’ of the artificial limb. They produce force for movement.

 Dr. Michael Goldfarb, PhD; a researcher at the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics at Vanderbilt University has developed a prosthetic limb with a motorized knee and ankle, the first of its kind.  See it in use here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_VBRYWH4EY

Of course the ultimate goal in the field of prosthetics and cybernetics would be the ability to control artificial limbs directly with the mind, in the same way we control natural limbs. DARPA along with APL (Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab) has untaken research into this and is even set to begin human trails with the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for 22 degrees of freedom (http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=65123). The project uses an advanced prosthetic known as the Modular Prosthetic Limb

Now the ultimate goal in the field of prosthetics and cybernetics would be the ability to control artificial limbs directly with the mind, in the same way we control natural limbs. DARPA along with APL (Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab) has untaken research into this and is even set to begin human trails with the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for 22 degrees of freedom (http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=65123). The project uses an advanced prosthetic known as the Modular Prosthetic Limb (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjzA9b9T3d8) and is being developed as part of the $100 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. Tests have already been conducted on patients with spinal cord injuries. By adapting an Electrocortigraphy (ECoG) grid (brain mapping technique), surgeons were able to implant an array of electrodes on a tetraplegia patient’s brain allowing them to control the movement of the prosthesis (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yff20TlHv34).

See you in Austin.

I was honored to be selected as a speaker at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival, Sunday, March 10, at 5PM in the Longhorn room at the Omni hotel in Downtown Austin.   I am in the unique position of being active in the medical device space as well as a consultant on video games, which deal with augmentation of the human body in the not-so-distant future. I plan to add a few posts that will give a brief preview of my presentation at SXSW,  plus you can view the session on the SXSW website: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP1786.  #Cyborg2027  #SXSW

1.   Cyborg Hearing

Figure 1: Deus Ex Auditory Augmentations Menu

“A cochlear implant is a small electronic device implanted into the cochlea which aims to restore a very basic level of hearing to the deaf or severely heard of hearing. They are the most widely used neuroprosthetics in the U.S.”

Hugh Darrow – Excerpt from a paper in NeoNature, February 2010.

The cochlear implant that appears in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is part of a suite of enhancements called the Infolink Telecommunications package. This system of implants allows for wireless and noiseless communication. It is almost like having an advanced version of a cell-phone within your ear. How likely is this to happen given current technology?

As mentioned earlier, current cochlear implants use a transmitter/receiver system, along with a microphone, to conduct sound waves (which have been converted to electrical signals) to the auditory nerve. It is a simple matter to have the receiver pick up other signals and transmit them as sound, much like a radio antenna. There already exists a number of wireless, hands-free devices on the market, and they are getting smaller and smaller. In the future, instead of using a hands-free device, the incoming signal could be picked up by the cochlear implant receiver. In fact, an implanted receiver linked to a central computer-assisted parser would be able to receive any signal, analyze it, and direct the data to a suite of implants directly linked to the CNS (central nervous system) to be interpreted by the user. For instance, after receiving a communications signal from someone half-way around the world, the parser would isolate and send sound data to a cochlear implant so that the user could hear the caller, and visual data to a retinal implant so that the user could see the caller on a virtual HUD.

Fig 2: Deus Ex Infolink wireless communications

In noisy surroundings or for the sake of privacy, return communication could eventually be made using Subvocal Recognition (SVR), instead of speaking out loud. NASA is currently working on technology “to computerize human, silent reading using nerve signals in the throat that control speech” (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/04_18AR.html), for use in space related activities. This involves the detection of nerve signals in the vocal cords and associated speech muscles (such as the tongue) even when no words are spoken. These signals can then be interpreted by software (such as a computer-assisted parser) as actual words and can be used to convey simple orders to machines.

The microphone of the cochlear implant may also altered to detect a wider range of frequencies and a greater range of decibel levels. But since the microphone is a man-made device, it could be altered to detect more than sound waves, which are mechanical. It could be built to pick up electromagnetic energy as well, for instance, radio waves. This signal would be sent to a Computer-Assisted Parser which would convert the data to visual information and project it on the user’s retinal implant as HUD data. Instant radar! This is possible in 2027, according to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In fact, the Cochlear Implant combined with the Stealth Enhancer and the Retinal Implant, can allow the user to actually see the amount of noise they are making depicted on the HUD radar, by displaying a circle around their position on the radar.

(Cochlear Implant For Some, a Miracle. For Others, a Tool.  Jamie Berke.www. About.com June 22, 2011).

Figure 3. Cochlear Implant. (www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/coch.asp)

Cochlear implants function differently from hearing aids (although they are sometimes used in conjunction – see Electric Acoustic Stimulation). Traditional hearing aids simply amplify sound stimulus and transmit it through the external ear. They make use of the existing structures (eardrum, ossicles, cochlea, Organ of Corti) to stimulate the auditory nerve. A cochlear implant (Figure 1) uses electrical signals to directly stimulate the auditory nerve. This allows sound to skip around damaged hair cells in the cochlea (or any other structures that may be damaged) and go directly to the brain. Sound waves are picked up by a microphone near the outside of a patient’s ear and transferred to a speech processor that converts the sounds into electrical signals. The processor then sends those electrical signals to the coil transmitter on the user’s head (held in place by a magnet under the skin). The coil transmits the electrical signals to an array of electrodes implanted around the cochlea. The electrodes stimulate the auditory nerve, and the auditory nerve sends the signals to the person’s brain to be interpreted into sound

As of 2006, 110,000 (2010 = 219 000, NIH Publication No. 11-4798 (2011-03-01). “Cochlear Implants”. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. ) people worldwide had cochlear prostheses installed. Current devices do not handle speech perception in background noise well.  However, research is being done into preprocessing accessories to improve the performance of the speech recognition processor.

I was pleased to see that the Microtransponder quarterly meetings had on-time/on-budget reports from each division. The team is understaffed by 3000% but they treat their work like a mission and I have no doubt they will see success after success. I also think that my transition from CEO to Chairman has been completed. I’m reveling in my role as Board member/advisory to Microtransponder and Lexington Technology Group and expect to announce some new roles going forward. I think my style is better in the beginning (chaotic) stages of translating discoveries from ideas to animal studies to first in man clinical studies. Rosellini Scientific expects to enter strategic partnerships (or has already) to handle animal to man development programs in a wide variety of medical device therapeutics. I have added some new elements to my model this go around, would love to hear your comments/suggestions or if you have novel medical IP that might fit into this model let me know…

1. The first change in strategy deals with our acquisitions of Elite and Integrity Biomedical. These two companies provide medical device sales and biomedical engineering services to rehabilitation clinics in hospital, nursing homes and sports medicine clinics. We did this to provide cashflow for company infrastructure and to force us to get that intuitive feel for unmet clinical need in the marketplace. If our biomedical techs report a piece of equipment is continuously breaking or physicians are struggling with some element of a design and if our sales people are talking to 1000′s of end users of medical products per year, then our engineers and scientists will have access to a demand function that is sometimes missing in smaller/more focused start-ups. We hope this makes us better at picking out real unmet clinical needs.

2. We are also entering strategic partnerships with inventors/small companies that need help with the C-level activities of fundraising…most novel technologies don’t need a full-time CEO/C-level executives. The most critical inflection points involve prototype completion or data accumulation. Most good C-level execs really become more engineer than business person…we think we can provide the primary business/clinical and regulatory advice needed for these early stage technologies. If you add in a healthy dose of creative financing, I’m hoping to usher in 3 to 5 novel technologies per year through the first in man clinical study.

3. Lastly, one key strategic element is how we are handling our intellectual property. I believe we are on the cutting edge of a trend where companies outsourcing their IP operations. It is well-known Industry leaders 3M (MMM), Disney (DIS), Intel (INTC), General Electric (GE), Microsoft (MSFT), Boston Scientific (BSX), Samsung (SSNLF.PK), Fujitsu, Exxon Mobil (XOM), Xerox (XRX) and many more have found themselves all doing business with Acacia Research Corporation (ACTG). We have partnered with IPNav to help us outsource our IP licensing. This has made an enormous difference…What do a surgeon designing medical technologies, a software developer coding a unique interface, an engineer of electric car batteries, and an ahead-of-its-time broadband communications company have in common? The answer is patents. What problems does the same roster have in common? The answers are: difficulty in effectively licensing or commercializing a patent, patent infringements, and a lack of funds to pursue legal action and defend against infringers. IPNav fills a niche role of partnering with inventors and patent owners like us to license their patents to corporations or in helping to acquire patents that are core to our technologies. We are excited to combine our biomedical engineering expertise with IPNav’s expertise in licensing…we hope 2013 will be a very big year for advancing technologies to the patients who need them.

Accelerating Intelligence

A Better Brain Implant: Listening to single neurons

A thin, flexible electrode developed at the University of Michigan is 10 times smaller than the nearest competition and could make long-term measurements of neural activity practical.

This kind of technology could also be used eventually to send brain-computer-interface (BCI) signals to prosthetic limbs, overcoming inflammation caused by larger electrodes, resulting in damage to both the brain and the electrodes.

Existing electrodes are stiff and enormous compared to neurons. They are also attacked by the immune system, inflaming brain tissue and blocking communication between the electrode and the cells.

The new electrode is unobtrusive. It is a thread of highly conductive carbon fiber, coated in plastic to block out signals from other neurons. The conductive gel pad at the end is compatible with soft cell membranes, and that close connection means the signals from brain cells come in much clearer.

“It’s a huge step forward,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering. ”This electrode is about seven microns in diameter, or 0.007 millimeters, and its closest competitor is about 25 to 100 microns.”

Listening to single neurons

To demonstrate how well the electrode listens in on real neurons, the team, headed by Daryl Kipke, professor of biomedical engineering, implanted it into the brains of rats. The electrode’s narrow profile allows it to focus on just one neuron, and the team saw this in the sharp electrical signals coming through the fiber. They weren’t getting a muddle of multiple neurons in conversation.Listening to single neurons could also help with neuroscience research in general.

“How neurons are communicating with each other? What are the pathways for information processing in the brain? These are the questions that can be answered in the future with this kind of technique,” Kotov said.

“Because these devices are so small, we can combine them with emerging optical techniques to visually observe what the cells are doing in the brain while listening to their electrical signals,” said Takashi Kozai, who led the project as a student in Kipke’s lab and has since earned his Ph.D. “This will unlock new understanding of how the brain works on the cellular and network level.”

The electrode that the team tested is not a clinical trial-ready device, but the results strongly suggest that creating feasible electrode arrays at these small dimensions is a viable path forward for making longer-lasting devices,” he said.

Minimizing immune response and inflammation

In order to listen to a neuron for long, or help people control a prosthetic as they do a natural limb, the electrodes need to be able to survive for years in the brain without doing significant damage. With only six weeks of testing, the team couldn’t say for sure how the electrode would fare in the long term, but the results were promising.

“Typically, we saw a peak in immune response at two weeks, then by three weeks it subsided, and by six weeks it had already stabilized,” Kotov said. “That stabilization is the important observation.”

The rat’s neurons and immune system got used to the electrodes, suggesting that the electronic invaders might be able to stay for the long term.

Kipke is optimistic that prosthetic devices could start linking up with the brain in a decade or so. ”The surrounding work of developing very fine robotic control and clinical training protocols — that work is progressing along its own trajectory,” Kipke said.

Kipke is director of the Center for Neural Communication Technology. Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, is a professor of biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, biomaterials science and engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering. Joerg Lahann, director of the Biointerfaces Institute, is a professor of chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering.

The work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Neural Communication Technology, an NIH-funded biotechnology research center.

IF a brain implant were safe and available and allowed you to operate your iPad or car using only thought, would you want one? What about an embedded device that gently bathed your brain in electrons and boosted memory and attention? Would you order one for your children?

In a future presidential election, would you vote for a candidate who had neural implants that helped optimize his or her alertness and functionality during a crisis, or in a candidates’ debate? Would you vote for a commander in chief who wasn’t equipped with such a device?

If these seem like tinfoil-on-the-head questions, consider the case of Cathy Hutchinson. Paralyzed by a stroke, she recently drank a canister of coffee by using a prosthetic arm controlled by thought. She was helped by a device called Braingate, a tiny bed of electrons surgically implanted on her motor cortex and connected by a wire to a computer.

Working with a team of neuroscientists at Brown University, Ms. Hutchinson, then 58, was asked to imagine that she was moving her own arm. As her neurons fired, Braingate interpreted the mental commands and moved the artificial arm and humanlike hand to deliver the first coffee Ms. Hutchinson had raised to her own lips in 15 years.

Braingate has barely worked on just a handful of people, and it is years away from actually being useful. Yet it’s an example of nascent technologies that in the next two to three decades may transform life not only for the impaired, but also for the healthy.

Other medical technologies that might break through the enhancement barrier range from genetic modifications and stem-cell therapies that might make people cognitively more efficient to nano-bots that could one day repair and optimize molecular structures in cells.

Many researchers, including the Brown neuroscientist John Donoghue, leader of the Braingate team, adamantly oppose the use of their technologies for augmenting the nonimpaired. Yet some healthy Americans are already availing themselves of medical technologies. For years millions of college students and professionals have been popping powerful stimulants like Adderall and Provigil to take exams and to pull all-nighters. These drugs can be highly addictive and may not work for everyone. While more research is needed, so far no evidence has emerged that legions of users have been harmed. The same may be true for a modest use of steroids for athletes.

Which leads us to the crucial question: How far would you go to modify yourself using the latest medical technology?

Over the last couple of years during talks and lectures, I have asked thousands of people a hypothetical question that goes like this: “If I could offer you a pill that allowed your child to increase his or her memory by 25 percent, would you give it to them?”

The show of hands in this informal poll has been overwhelming, with 80 percent or more voting no.

Then I asked a follow-up question. “What if this pill was safe and increased your kid’s grades from a B average to an A average?” People tittered nervously, looked around to see how others were voting as nearly half said yes. (Many didn’t vote at all.)

“And what if all of the other kids are taking the pill?” I asked. The tittering stopped and nearly everyone voted yes.

No pill now exists that can boost memory by 25 percent. Yet neuroscientists tell me that pharmaceutical companies are testing compounds in early stage human trials that may enable patients with dementia and other memory-stealing diseases to have better recall. No one knows if these will work to improve healthy people, but it’s possible that one will work in the future.

More intriguing is the notion that a supermemory or attention pill might be used someday by those with critical jobs like pilots, surgeons, police officers — or the chief executive of the United States. In fact, we may demand that they use them, said the bioethicist Thomas H. Murray. “It might actually be immoral for a surgeon not to take a drug that was safe and steadied his hand,” said Mr. Murray, the former president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research group. “That would be like using a scalpel that wasn’t sterile.”

HERE is a partial checklist of cutting-edge medical-technology therapies now under way or in an experimental phase that might lead to future enhancements.

More than 200,000 deaf people have had their hearing partially restored by a brain implant that receives sound waves and uses a minicomputer to process and deliver them directly into the brain via the cochlear (audio) nerve. New and experimental technologies could lead to devices that allow people with or possibly without hearing loss to hear better, possibly much better.

The Israel-based company Nano Retina and others are developing early-stage devices and implants that restore partial sight to the blind. Nano Retina uses a tiny sensor backed by electrodes embedded in the back of the eye, on top of the retina. They replace connections damaged by macular degeneration and other diseases. So far images are fuzzy and gray-scale and a long way from restoring functional eyesight. Scientists, however, are currently working on ways to mimic and improve eyesight in people and in robots that could lead to far more sophisticated technologies.

Engineers at companies like Ekso Bionics of Richmond, Calif., are building first-generation exoskeletons that aim to allow patients with paralyzed legs to walk, though the devices are still in the baby-step phase. This summer the sprinter Oscar Pistorius of South Africa proved he could compete at the Olympics using artificial half-leg blades called Cheetahs that some worried might give him an advantage over runners with legs made of flesh and blood. Neuroscientists are developing more advanced prosthetics that may one day be operated from the brain via fiber optic lines embedded under the skin.

For years, scientists have been manipulating genes in animals to make improvements in neural performance, strength and agility, among other augmentations. Directly altering human DNA using “gene therapy” in humans remains dangerous and fraught with ethical challenges. But it may be possible to develop drugs that alter enzymes and other proteins associated with genes for, say, speed and endurance or dopamine levels in the brain connected to improved neural performance.

Synthetic biologists contend that re-engineering cells and DNA may one day allow us to eliminate diseases; a few believe we will be able to build tailor-made people. Others are convinced that stem cells might one day be used to grow fresh brain, heart or liver cells to augment or improve cells in these and other organs.

Not all enhancements are high-tech or invasive. Neuroscientists are seeing boosts from neuro-feedback and video games designed to teach and develop cognition and from meditation and improvements in diet, exercise and sleep. “We may see a convergence of several of these technologies,” said the neurologist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California at San Francisco. He is developing brain-boosting games with developers and engineers who once worked for Lucas Arts, founded by the “Star Wars” director George Lucas.

Which leads to another question: How far would you go to augment yourself? Would you replace perfectly good legs with artificial ones if they made you faster and stronger? What if a United States Agency for Human Augmentation had approved this and other radical enhancements? Would that persuade you?

Ethical challenges for the coming Age of Enhancement include, besides basic safety questions, the issue of who would get the enhancements, how much they would cost, and who would gain an advantage over others by using them. In a society that is already seeing a widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the question of a democracy of equals could face a critical test if the well-off also could afford a physical, genetic or bionic advantage. It also may challenge what it means to be human.

Still, the enhancements are coming, and they will be hard to resist. The real issue is what we do with them once they become irresistible.

By DAVID EWING DUNCAN
David Ewing Duncan is a journalist who has contributed to the science section of The New York Times.

A group of college students is staying up late together to study for exams. Several of them have been drinking cofee all day and are wide awake, although feeling jittery. One of the students, Lisa, mentions that she has recently started taking a prescription medication that helps her stay awake because of a medical condition. Lisa had previously been a heavy cof­fee drinker, consuming four or more cups of cofee a day in her struggle to stay awake. Since starting on the new medication, she is able to stay awake easily for a day or longer and is not experiencing any negative side efects. “It’s better than cofee,” she tells her friends, “but it is a lot more expensive.”

Background

The central nervous system (CNS—the spinal cord and brain) directs the functions of the body. The peripheral nervous system (PNS) takes sensory inputs and relays them to the brain, which evaluates them. The CNS then transmits messages to the appropriate organ or tissue. Drugs that act on the CNS usually do so by interacting with this messaging system, often by stimulating or inhibiting the release of neurotransmitters (the chemical messengers that travel between nerve cells).

Caffeine

Many drugs act on the CNS to enhance alertness. The most popular behavior-altering drug is the stimulant caffeine. An estimated 9 out of 10 Americans consume some type of caffeine regularly. Caffeine is well known for its ability to briefly relieve fatigue and drowsiness.

Caffeine is found naturally in more than 60 plants. It is in coffee, tea, soft drinks, and, to a lesser extent, chocolate, and it’s sometimes added to medicines. Caffeine is absorbed quickly and travels to the brain. Excreted several hours after it’s been consumed, it does not build up in the blood and is not stored in the body.

Although some people are highly sensitive to the effects of caffeine, most are not harmed by the amount of caffeine in two to three cups of coffee per day (200–300 milligrams total). More than 500–600 milligrams per day of caffeine (as much as in four to seven cups of coffee) can result in sleeplessness, headaches, irritability, anxiousness, and changes in heart rhythm. Caffeine is addictive, and individuals who consume large quantities of it exhibit withdrawal symptoms if they suddenly stop using it.

ENHANCEMENTS INCLUDED IN THE PDF
Full size PDF is available by clicking the upper right corner of the PDF viewer (the arrow).

Caffeine
Modafinil
Myostatin
Erythropoietin (EPO)
Growth Hormone
Beta-Blockers

Copyright © 2009 Education Development Center, Inc. Exploring Bioethics.
Permission granted for classroom use.

The Gist

Human-powered medical devices sound like something out of a science-fiction movie where androids walk the street, cars hover above, and your daily cup of coffee is teleported onto your nightstand. (Now wouldn’t that be nice?) While those latter items may be a few years off, heart-powered pacemakers are closer than you’d think.

Findings from the study of an experimental device that used energy from a beating heart to power a pacemaker was presented on Sunday at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions. This type of energy-harvesting device uses piezoelectricity, or electric charge that is generated from motion, the study says. The potential impact of pacemakers that run on piezoelectricity is huge, largely because it could decrease the number of surgeries required to change out the batteries on traditional pacemaker devices.

Pacemakers are electrical devices that are implanted under the skin to help manage irregular heartbeats. There are two kinds of heartbeat irregularities, or arrhythmias, that pacemakers are used to treat: tachycardia and bradycardia, too fast and too slow, respectively. Today’s pacemakers generally consist of the battery and electronics that regulate arrhythmias and the leads that reach out to and communicate with the heart. The problem is that, eventually, the batteries must be replaced.

With piezoelectric-powered pacemakers, the extra surgeries needed to replace batteries won’t be required.

Researchers determined that nonlinear energy harvesters, or those that adapt to fluctuating heartbeats of 20 to 600 beats per minute (bpm), could continuously power pacemakers. Super-fit athletes rarely have a resting pulse below 50 bpm, and tachycardic rhythms are in the 200 bpm range. Nonlinear harvesters utilized magnets to streamline energy conversion and desensitize the device to changes in the number of heartbeats per minute.

The Expert Take

While human-powered devices sound cool, practically, they mean amazing things for the lives of pacemaker patients. “Currently, pacemaker patients have to go through surgeries every five to seven years to replace the battery of their pacemakers,” says lead study author Amin Karami, a research fellow in the department of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. The proposed technology removes this need.

“Our nonlinear piezoelectric harvester (NPH) provides more power than the batteries,” says Karami. This also means that more capabilities can be integrated into future pacemakers—think more efficient and longer-lived devices.

Researchers turned to piezoelectric devices because they were looking for a mechanism that converts mechanical—in this case, vibrational—energy into electrical energy. And the flexibility of NPH devices makes them a reliable, sustainable substitute for batteries in pacemakers. “Among the transduction mechanisms, piezoelectric devices work best at the small scales,” Karami says.

The Takeaway

Piezoelectric devices may power the next generation of pacemakers. Because of their durability, they may be a more attractive means of powering many implanted devices. Future study, says Karami, will look into applying this technology to commercially distributed pacemakers.

Source & Method

Researchers simulated human heartbeats using a “shaker” device in the laboratory, which produced vibrations that powered NPH devices. They tested 100 simulated sets of heartbeats across a range of rates and found that the energy harvester generated more than 10 times the power needed for a functioning pacemaker. NPH harvesters are about half the size of the batteries currently used in pacemakers, and implantation tests of these devices is the next step.

Other Research

The wire’s alive: In a report published in Advanced Functional Materials in 2010, researchers observed the effects of piezoelectricity on nanowires.

–by Nina Lincoff

Memory loss and inability to acquire new memories are common consequences of traumatic brain injury, and memory dysfunction is an expensive, long-term treatment problem for the military.  Recovery from loss of memory associated with critical work and life tasks is essential to the recovery of a brain-wounded war-fighter   A biomimetic model of the hippocampus could serve as a neural prosthesis for lost cognitive function and memory impairment.

The Restorative Encoding Memory Integration Neural Device (REMIND) program will determine the nature and means by which short-term memory is encoded to enable restoration of memory through use of devices programmed to bypass injured regions of the brain.  Researchers will demonstrate the ability to restore performance on a short-term memory task in animal models, as well as determine quantitative descriptive methods for describing the means and processes by which memory is encoded.

“Enhancement Technology has some emerging technologies that will be interesting to watch unfold in the coming years.  The science of Reproductive Technology has advanced to enable embryo selection.  We have seen plastic surgery and orthodontic implants for cosmetic enhancement.  Of course, Lance Armstrong is one of a host of athletes who has been, and I’m sure will continue, to be on the cutting edge of drug related enhancement technologies.”  Will Rosellini 

Will Rosellini also stated that he believes DARPA will lead the way with a myriad of programs in soldier enhancement.  The technology developed in these programs since as early as 2009 should be coming to light soon.

Program Manager:  Dr. Geoffrey Ling
geoffrey.ling@darpa.mil