Implants Powered by a Beating Heart
New Device Captures the Heart's Energy Source: Dartmouth College Implants Powered By Electricity from Heart Beats This is fascinating and very promising research from Dartmouth College engineers funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), The Dartmouth team have created a dime sized device that harvests the kinetic energy of a beating heart to generate electricity and power a biomedical device indefinitely. It's an implant, a heart pacemaker, powered by a beating heart. Dime-Sized Device What is so interesting is this is a dime sized device. It relies on a thin film - piezoelectric film - attached to a pacemaker's lead. It converts heart beats' kinetic energy into electricity to power the pacemaker implant. NIH Funded Research with Other Implant Device Applications This is essentially an organ energy harvesting device that could work beyond the heart and for other organs such as kidneys. The Dartmouth team's three years of research res...