Maglev Heart Could Keep Cardiac Patients Alive
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
If this guy's ideas worked, he wouldn't be doing his work in Panama, hawking supplements, and appearing on Joe Rogan. He'd be among the wealthiest persons in the world. "Snake oil" works because you are selling a cure to desperate people, and fear of mortality is almost universal.
With regard to organ donors, the meth problem is causing all sorts of heart valve infections due to users injecting impure substances into their veins.
This, of course, is no issue for people in non-socialized medicine countries, but in places like Canada it puts a further strain on available hearts as the meth users end up being another drain on Cardiac resources.
BTW, how does one "keep one's inflammation down"?
I can't wait for the future where artificial organs and limbs not only match the usability and functionality of the normal ones, but actually exceed it.
Why? What exactly would you do with those capabilities? Sit at a desk job and work 50 hours a week to make payments on your super organs and limbs?
You can already achieve great levels of performance with regular limbs and organs, and most people don’t take advantage of that, so I don’t see what artificial ones will add.
There's no magical solution.
The heart develops several watts of mechanical power 24/7 [1], i.e. that's what is required even if the pump was perfectly efficient, and I doubt pumps are that efficient.
[1] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/IradaMuslumova.shtml
How does this conflate with respiratory failure, which usually leads to cardiac failure? Will we presumedly need new EFR training to avoid frying this with an AED?
The batteries are outside the body, so replacing them is not a big deal.
> Are these custom batteries that become the new insulin?
Surgery to implant this machine will probably be in the $1 million range, new batteries are a rounding error on that.
> Will we presumedly need new EFR training to avoid frying this with an AED?
An AED looks for fibrillation before triggering, if it doesn't detect that it won't fire. Same for a Dr. - they look for fibrillation, they don't just randomly apply paddles like in the movies.
Batteries might not a few years down the road.
Most?? Most deductibles are under $5,500, you bet it exceeds it.
Did you mean policy limits? Those were made illegal recently (part of why healthcare costs went up so much).
> Batteries might not a few years down the road.
Doesn't matter. Someone with this device will have so much medical monitoring the cost of a battery won't be noticed. A battery will cost less than a single Dr. visit probably.
A few years from now, you might not be able to afford that new $5,000 battery you need to RUN your heart.
> Someone with this device will have so much medical monitoring the cost of a battery won't be noticed. A battery will cost less than a single Dr. visit probably.
The same could be said about people with insulin pumps, yet we see financial problems kill them.
If this becomes successful, I can see doctors adjusting to other methods of measuring heart activity, but I don't see how they could be noninvasive.
Any moving or flexing part is subject to wear and tear, and the risk of eventual breakdown, necessitating replacement surgery every few years. Open heart surgery is involved, somewhat risky, and puts the organism under significant stress by its very nature.
To the best of my (layman's) knowledge, pulse is not really needed by the body, and using smooth flow pumps causes no health risk. Of course there's the inability to check for the pulse or its tempo, as well as the mental impact of not having the expected sign of being alive.
This seems like a potential issue.
Seems like something like a portable ECMO (not sure if that exists) would be less invasive
(ECMO is for oxigination which probably would be overkill in this situation)
How so? That's light enough even a kid could wear it as a backpack.
The article talks about designing the machine to handle running, so I think it's intended for people to wear it for life and be generally healthy.
If my options are death or a battery pack, I think I’d go with the battery pack
(There are probably a whole host of knock on effects that I'm not considering. I'm not a biologist.)
We could follow traditional glycolysis but without a recapture method, would cells create excess ATP? What would that affect? Would it change the production of insulin and it’s affects on storing tryglicerides? I barely have enough knowledge here to ask questions let alone have answers.
Anyway, I'm not sure breaking glucose is that useful. Won't it just make people hungry?