Man Receives World’s First Wirelessly Powered Heart Pump

February 11th, 2019 Medgadget Editors Cardiac Surgery, Cardiology, Critical Care

Heart pumps are electromechanical devices that have all kinds of limitations placed on them. One of those is that the pumps needs quite a bit of energy to augment blood output, so a power cable protruding through the skin has always been a necessity. This point of entry is prone to becoming infected, the patient has to continuously wear power gear outside the body, and it’s one of the biggest reasons that heart pumps are not more commonly used for long periods of time.

Leviticus Cardio, a company based in Israel, and Jarvik Heart, the famous maker of artificial hearts, have announced that a man in Kazakhstan became the first person in the world to receive a completely implanted ventricular assist device (VAD). The gentleman received a Jarvik 2000 VAD, which was powered by Leviticus Cardio’s Coplanar Energy Transfer (CET) system.

The Leviticus CET consists of an coil ring that is implanted around the lungs and attached to the chest wall, an internal battery and controller, and bra-like device that transmits energy to the coil ring, an external battery and controller, and a smartwatch to monitor the status of the system. There’s also a tablet computer that is used to program the system during the setup process.

The system is designed to work with all currently available VAD devices, as it supplies up to 30 Watts of continuous power. The system can be used even while the patient is walking and moving around, as the supplied electro-magnetic inductance can cover a large effective area encompassing the whole of the coil ring.

Thanks to an internal battery, patients should be able to be completely free from all the external power components for up to six hours or more. This can provide a level of comfort and independence that existing heart pumps simply cannot offer.

Here’s a video about the first implantation and the patient using the CET system: