New heart pump needs no wires

SYDNEY - Heart pumps, hooked with wires to power themselves, end up seriously infecting nearly 40 percent of patients. Scientists have now developed the technology to power heart pump wirelessly thus saving thousands of lives, and eventually offering an alternative to heart transplants.

The wireless pump uses magnetic fields to transfer power through skin rather than using wire cables and can be powered this way 24 hours a day for a lifetime.

The new technology came out of collaboration among scientists from University of Aucklands Bio-engineering Institute, departments of electrical and computer engineering and physiology.

A new company, TETCor, was created to market the technology for powering a wide range of such implanted devices.

TETCor CEO Simon Malpas says heart pumps need a huge amount of power. The only way to power current artificial heart pumps is through a wire cable that goes through a patients stomach and chest, according to an Auckland University release.

These wires cause serious infections, sometimes leading to death, in about forty percent of patients. The wires are also prone to breaking and restrict a patients activities, said Malpas.

This new wireless heart pump weights only 92 grams and measures just seven cm by three cm. It uses a coil outside a persons body to generate a magnetic field. A second coil placed inside a persons body, near the collar bone, picks up the signal from this field and creates power for the pump.

Malpas says previous attempts at making wireless heart pumps produced too much heat. These earlier pumps would have ended up cooking a person from the inside.