A TRANSCUTANEOUS WIRELESS ENERGY TRANSMISSION BASED BATTERY RECHARGER FOR IMPLANTED PACEMAKER

Leopoldo Angrisani, Guido d’Alessandro, Mauro D’Arco

Abstract

A transcutaneous wireless energy transmission system exploiting resonant inductive coupling to recharge the battery of a pacemaker is proposed. Pacemakers are electronic biomedical devices necessary for the treatment of specific cardiovascular diseases. Energy provision required by the pacemaker to operate is usually granted by means of long lasting batteries, that anyway require periodical checks and substitution. Wireless energy transfer to medical implants is therefore desirable, since it offers a non-invasive way to recharge batteries of implanted devices, viz. it could allow to delay surgery for substitution. The proposed system shows that transcutaneous energy transfer can be attained by coupling the electronics of the implanted hardware with an external energy source. In particular it supplies a primary coil, which is positioned at contact with the chest of the patient, with an alternate current to produce a magnetic flux; the latter enfolds a secondary coil, which is instead implanted in the human body in the proximity of the pacemaker, and allows to retrieve the energy to recharge the implanted battery. To limit the eddy currents that would be induced in the titanium case of the pacemaker and could produce undesired heating and/or malfunctioning, the proposed system utilizes a magnetic shield; the shield is also useful to avoid that the aforementioned parasitic coupling worsens the energy transfer efficiency.

Keywords

implanted medical devices, pacemaker, battery recharging, resonant structure, magnetic coupling

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IMEKO-WC-2015-TC13-264.pdf

DOI

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IMEKO TC

TC13 - Measurements in Biology and Medicine

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