The leadless pacemaker is the most recent pacemaker concept, developed to overcome conventional pacemakers’ limitations. This technology offers better comfort to the patients, lower risk from implantation, and higher reliability. However, these devices suffer from limited battery lifetime due to the extreme miniaturization required for implantation inside the heart cavities. This work proposes extending the battery lifetime by converting biomechanical heartbeat energy into electricity using an innovative electrostatic MEMS energy harvesting device. Based on theoretical models and experiments, we propose a general approach to choosing the optimal interface circuit which considers the parasitic capacitance of the circuit, as it is an imperfection that significantly affects the power performance. According to the energy consumed by the last generation commercial leadless pacemakers, the proposed MEMS solution with optimal interface circuit experimentally showed the possibility of extending the pacemaker battery lifetime by up to 44%.

References

Biomechanical mems electrostatic energy harvester for pacemaker application : a study of optimal interface circuit
Francisco Ambia, Nathalie Isac, Abdelmounaim Harouri, David Bouville, Elie Lefeuvre
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2023)
DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2023.3327957

Contact C2N : Elie Lefeuvre

Figure : Left : leadless pacemaker ; center :  biomechanical energy harvesting MEMS ; right: SEM picture with details of the silicon combs performing electrostatic transduction