Powering a pacemaker with a patient's heartbeat

Implantable pacemakers have without doubt altered modern medicine, saving countless lives by regulating heart rhythm. But they have one serious shortcoming: Their batteries last only five to 12 years, at which point they ...

Low-power chip for intra-cardiac ventricular fibrillation detection

Imec demonstrated a low-power (20µW), intra-cardiac signal processing chip for the detection of ventricular fibrillation at this week's International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2013) in San Francisco with Olympus. ...

Can chaos theory help predict heart attacks?

Chaos models may someday help model cardiac arrhythmias -- abnormal electrical rhythms of the heart, say researchers in the journal CHAOS, which is published by the American Institute of Physics.