"The heart produces around 1 or 1.5 watts of hydraulic power, and we want to take maybe one milliwatt," Pfenniger explains. "A pacemaker only needs around 10 microwatts." At the Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology conference in Lucerne, Switzerland, earlier this month, Pfenniger presented results from a trial in which a tube is designed to mimic the internal thoracic artery, a millimeters-wide vessel that doctors sometimes cannibalize for surgery because it is redundant. The most efficient of the three off-the-shelf turbines he tested produced around 800 microwatts, which could run devices much more power hungry than today’s pacemakers.Pretty interesting. But the body is a formidable hydroelectric plant; they still have to work out the clotting and hemolysis potential of these devices...
-Wes
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