No Heart Attack: Electronic Heart Sleeve

The future of medicine: This custom-fit membrane is woven with a network of electrodes that sense body movement and regulate blood flow - it might one day prevent heart attacks in humans

Scientists have created an external membrane using a 3-D printer than can keep a heart beating virtually forever. The thin membrane is elastic, designed to stretch over a heart like a glove, and is outfitted with tiny electrodes that monitor cardiac function – it was first demonstrated as a proof of concept on a rabbit heart. Researchers at both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University published the astonishing breakthrough in nature, and hope it will someday help prevent heart attacks in humans.

It is about 10-15 years away from being made available to humans, but the revolutionary device might be a long-term solution to these normally catastrophic events. The team told Gizmodo’s Sploid that they were able to custom fit it to the rabbit’s heart by using computers to scan it’s surface area and put together a mold for the membrane. They then put it together and wove it with a spider web-like network of electrodes that interact with the rest of the body to regulate heart beat – it’s light years ahead of a pacemaker. ‘This artificial pericardium is instrumented with high quality, man-made devices that can sense and interact with the heart in different ways that are relevant to clinical cardiology,’ researcher John Rorgers said.

Those sensors track tissue movement and use the signals the nervous system, would normally send to the heart to regulate pulse. This methodology allows the device to keep the heart beating even when a heart attack or arrhythmia occurs.

From:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2571917/Membrane-heart-pumping-forever-possibly-prevent-heart-attacks.html