A Few Ways Engineers Heals a Broken Heart
Engineers fix broken heart.
I know that it might sound weird to hear that an engineers can heal a broken heart but if you really think about it and read a little bit about it you could find yourself interested and surprised.
Let’s start off with a pacemaker. Pacemakers are made of different parts. The casing and the lead are made out of titanium alloy but is covered in polyurethane.
What are pacemakers? Pacemakers are used to treat arrhythmias, or irregular heart beats. Pacemakers give the heart electric impulses by implanting wires into your heart that are connected to the computer. The pacemaker monitor your heart and when it realizes that your heart beat is a little too slow or slowing down it delivers an electrical energy to your heart.
Patients with afib, the most common arrhythmia are usually treated with a drug that has been used for many years like since the 1980s. The drug is known to be the most effective therapy till this day but the drug can be toxic to other parts of the body like the liver, the lungs, and thyroid. So group of engineers worked together to try to solve this problem. A conflict they came across was that the drug wasn’t thick enough because it was originally made of a lot of water so what they did is that they chunked the drug up into large pieces that looks like gel. The gel is inserted through in a catheter through a small incision. when it is inserted the catheter curls up in a circle than all of the drug is released and because the catheter is in a circle it is formed into a patch and it keeps it from spreading.
People with heart failure such as the heart isn’t pumping enough blood would normally have to stay at the hospital to be monitored by the doctors. A group of engineers got together and started working on a solution to this problem. They came up with this device that keeps track of all of that and reports it back to the doctors that way if the doctors notice that the heart is pumping enough blood the doctors can come up with a better treatment plan. The device look for a type of vibration in the body like a mini earthquakes and immediately interacts with the nurses from the hospital this way the patients can go home and there will be more space in the hospital’s
RELATED STORIES:
Innovations in Biomaterials Create New Roles for Engineers
