Bionic Powered Pacemaker

Researchers at Imperial College in London are working on a new pacemaker that harnesses energy from the beating of the heart. Energy harnessing in this way is similar to watches that rely on kinetic movement to 'charge up'. The idea is that the pacemaker keeps a tiny battery charged, which kicks in when the heartbeat falters—"rather like a solar-powered flashlight that uses the sunshine to power itself and then works in the dark when you need it," says Paul Mitcheson, who leads the study.

This new style of pacemaker is still just a prototype and has yet to be inserted into a human body, but Mitcheson hopes that the device "could prevent the need for replacing pacemakers every six or seven years, which at the moment involves complex heart surgery."

These kinds of devices raise interesting questions about the interaction of biological and mechanical worlds.

In the future, energy harvesting will become more useful in replacing batteries which have a limited lifetime. It should also help bridge the biological and mechanical worlds where our bodies supply the energy and, in return, the machine provides us with information that optimises the way our bodies perform?