A sensor-packed membrane fitted on an isolated rabbit heart.JOHN ROGERS ET ALThe device: John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues have created an elasticated, sensor-packed silicon membrane that fits snugly around a removed-but-still-beating rabbit heart and monitors various markers of cardiac health.
The tailor-made sheath, which is described in a paper published today (February 25) in Nature Communications, contains an array of sensors that can measure not just electrical activity, but also mechanical strain, temperature, and pH. The membrane also contains actuators for electrical, thermal, and optical stimulation.
“Currently, implantable heart devices are quite limited,” said study coauthor Igor Efimov, a cardiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “What John has developed here opens up a whole new tool kit for high-resolution cardiac monitoring and stimulation-based therapy.”
Rogers and his collaborators previously made stretchy sensor patches that can be applied to and removed from the skin like temporary tattoos. This time, his team used optical scanning techniques to capture the precise geometry of the rabbit heart and ...
