A leg brace that generates power to keep an artificial heart ticking. Rice University students and researchers have been working on a way to create a wearable energy generator to power artificial hearts for a few years now. They are currently closer to creating a more realistic prototype to serve their mission. (via Rice University)
Can you imagine how annoying it can be to change the battery on a pacemaker? Well a team at Rice University has been trying to create a sustainable source of energy for artificial hearts. The team is called “Farmers” and they have had at least three different groups of students try their hand at creating a wearable generator that can power an artificial heart. The Farmers team has come up with a lot of different prototypes over the years.
Their latest working prototype is a wearable leg brace that generates power every time the user bends their knee. Hence, it is supposed to produce 4 Watts of power every time the wearer walks, which is then fed into a lithium ion battery. At the moment, they are not testing this on actual implanted hearts, but their current prototypes may work theoretically. However, there is an issue of how to get the energy from the external battery to the implanted artificial heart – as you can imagine. The team is hoping to be able to wirelessly transmit the energy from the battery to the heart.
Wireless energy transmission has been made possible only last year as a company called WiTricity released the success of their prototype on everything from light bulbs, laptops, and cellphones to car batteries. The technology utilizes what WiTricity calls a “source resonator” that can transmit energy to other batteries when power is running through it via an electric coil that generates a magnetic field. If a device that has a partner coil is within range, it will be powered by this source resonator. The technology happens utilizing the same type of field generated by a WiFi signal. WiTricity has already teamed up with a medical company to wirelessly power artificial hearts. Hence, Rice University could be using this technology for their project within the next year, they hope.
In one of their earlier prototypes, they used a petal inside the user’s shoe to help generate power, however only their current iteration has the ability to actually store the energy generated into a lithium ion battery. The hardest problem to solve, they report, was making the brace comfortable enough to wear for long periods of time.
Users of this current version reported that the brace was comfortable enough, so they have certainly made progress. They also had to scale down the generator so that a user didn’t have a huge thing on their leg, causing trouble getting about. Now, I don’t know how often a user would have to walk everyday in order to maintain enough power to ensure that the battery can power their heart. Hopefully they won’t have to walk around this a brace the majority of their life, which would be extremely irritating.
While this project is pointed at powering artificial hearts, this same concept can be used to power just about anything else. Hence, I can see it being a starting concept for a wearable generator. If you combine a streamlined wearable generator with wireless energy transmission, I think we’ll be living in a very different world in the coming years.
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