It is thinner than a hair and can be glued to the heart. A new type of cardiac pacemaker was developed in Korea

Pacemaker have been saving people's lives for decades. However, these are large devices that are complicated and risky to implant. The solution of the future could lie in a device developed and tested at Yonsei University in Seoul. There, an ultra-thin device was developed that monitors the heart and, if necessary, electrical Signal gives. It has a special coating that makes it stick to a moist organ, like the heart.

Korean scientists tested it on a live rabbit and an artificial heart. The research results give cause for optimism. In your opinion, the device could one day be conventional Pacemaker replace.

Yonsei scientists focused on solving the problem of cardiac arrhythmias. This is a situation in which the heart beats too fast, too slow, or irregularly. Sometimes the arrhythmias are subtle or not a major problem, but sometimes they can be life-threatening. In the latter cases, the implantation of a pacemaker be the only way to save the patient's life.

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The Koreans have one Pacemaker Stick on developed that only 38 microns is fat. This is less than the thickness of a normal human hair. It is therefore many orders of magnitude smaller than the best currently used Pacemaker.
The new device consists of a number of pressure sensors for monitoring the heart and electrodes for delivering the electrical impulse. In tests on rabbits, the pacemaker detected cardiac arrhythmia and that Heart correctly regulated.

A big advantage of the device is not only its small size, but also the way it is attached. Currently, when a pacemaker is implanted, an electrode is typically inserted through a vein into the heart chamber. The new pacemaker resembles a band-aid that is put on the epicardium is glued. To solve the problem of sticking to wet surfaces, the researchers turned to nature. They found one hydrogel Algae-based that mimics the properties of mussels that adhere to various surfaces underwater. The hydrogel not only adheres to the epicardium, but is not absorbed by the body, is biocompatible and non-toxic.

The developers of the new pacemaker emphasize that this is just the beginning as they have only tested it on rabbits so far. It will be a long time before they can test performance on humans. However, they are already saying that their device will not only help people with cardiac arrhythmias. They want to develop it further so that it can be used in the investigation and monitoring of heart attacks, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, medial cardiac hypertrophy or dilated cardiomyopathy can be used.