Completely Artificial Hearts Approved 20
DarrylM writes: "From CBC's web page: 'The first people to have completely artificial hearts could be walking around by July . . . The new artificial hearts fit right into the chest cavity, with a battery pack positioned in the recipient's thorax. The designers said they wanted patients to show no external sign they had an artificial heart.'" Hmmm. I thought the Jarvik-7 was the first artificial heart...
oh.... (Score:1)
Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:4)
Re:Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:3)
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Re:Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:1)
___
battery life (Score:3)
Gee, you could have a race between your heart and your notebook, see which runs out of juice first.
Re:Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:2)
Ehem... (Score:1)
Re:Plutonium batteries ... (Score:1)
A pacemaker sends a very tiny signal to existing heart muscle to trigger it to contract. At this late hour I'll abstain from the actual calculations, but the signals are transmitted for brief periods of time (milliseconds) at small voltages (~100 mv) and represent an incredibly small amount of power. Even a tiny lithium battery can run a pacemaker for ten years.
A heart, on the other hand, must do the mechanical work to pump large volumes of liquid at fairly high pressures. The required power is roughly what you need to run a small cordless power tool continuously. How long will your drill run non-stop? One could make a twenty-hour battery, but it would probably weigh a significant fraction of the patient's body weight (say, 10 or 20 kilograms), which would defeat the entire purpose of this device.
I guess you could use plutonium to build an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) like those on most deep-space probes; that would have enough power to run it for a couple of months. But it would be huge, and the amount of plutonium required would be unhealthy...
It's called a LVAD (Left Ventricular assist device (Score:2)
The problem with the artificial hearts was blood clots. This remains to be a problem with any artificial valve used today and so people need to take coumadin (warfarin, aka rat poison) to thin their blood.
Transplants still work the best. I dont think that engineers have come up with any pumps with a MTBF of approx 70 years and 2.7 BILLION cycles.
Mother nature+Evolution = still the best..
Re:Plutonium batteries ... (Score:1)
LOLOL
Yes that could indeed cause an entirely new spectrum of problems. Not to mention that it would probably be very HEAVY. :)
I am trying to imagine something like a personal Topaz reactor. And of course the armed guards to make certain no one tries to abscond with the power supply. %)
In any case I do feel 1.5 hours is inadequate for long-term use of the device. I suspect it might be a decent stop-gap measure, and it is certainly less cumbersome than the air-powered ventricular assist devices that are out now.
Re:It's called a LVAD (Left Ventricular assist dev (Score:2)
I think they've come up with a new technique to get around the blood clotting problem by smearing the interior of such devices with a sticky finely ground sand that they then expose to blood and allow it to clot. The clotted blood is now firmly glued to interior of the device and I think that is supposed to reduce further risk of clots in the device making their way to vulnerable areas.
Re:battery life (Score:1)
Re:Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:2)
Packing someone's chest with tons of explosives and putting people on top will never become routine. I think we should all remember those who have given there lives so that we could achieve these milestones of the 20th century.
One and a Half Hours? (Score:1)
Better than dying perhaps, but not really an adequate solution to heart disease.
Isn't it possible to position lithium batteries in the human body so that they will constantly re-power themseleves?
Battery life (Score:1)
Seems like a great hacking target for terrorists: "If you don't fork over 6 umpzillion dollars in 12 hours, we will activate a high-powered EMP that will stop every artificial heart within a 70-mile radius."
Disclaimer: i'm not a terrorist, just a harmless paranoid sicko.
Penn State made it (Score:1)
Plutonium batteries ... (Score:2)
are very widely used for pacemakers to give them a life of ten years or more. I do not understand why such a short-lived battery would be used in a device like this.
If Uncle Fred gets too far away from the inductive recharger he's history. What happens if the charging pad slips in the middle of the night? What happens if he lives in California?
An hour and a half is not a very long window for such an intensely critical device.
I hope this is only the first in what will be a long series of devices whose abilities will progressively improve. If roaming times do not improve then an artificial heart will replace a condition that was a death sentence with a new condition, a boredom sentence.
I think twenty hours of operation per charge should be a minimum desirable goal for any device that would be widely deployed, with even longer periods between recharges required within a set time period by regulating agencies.
In the meantime, I commend researchers who invent alternatives to ever-scarce donor organs. I guess until we can make new organs easily boredom is preferable to death?
Re:Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:1)
Not again! (Score:1)
Re:Not again! (Score:2)