As heart conditions spread more and more, technology needs to keep its pace and continuously design devices that can help the disorders or even prevent them. The invention of the defibrillator or pacemaker were seen as great technological breakthroughs at their time, but as time went on, people keep expecting more. As we are very far away from designing a reliable artificial heart, further work on the pacemaker was needed. Recent news shows that scientists have come up with a way of harvesting the surplus energy of the heart in order to power a pacemaker or defibrillator.

Pacemakers are devices that run on batteries, helping the heart maintain a normal rhythm. Implantable cardioverter defibrillators are also battery powered and detect any abnormal heart pattern and immediately correct it by the use of electric shocks. Scientists were never in the position of giving the devices more energy, in order to make them do more complex things, like a more accurate monitoring of the heart. This was mainly because larger batteries mean discomfort and makes the people wearing them not feel at ease. Recently, scientists have managed to raise enough power from the actual movement involved in a heartbeat to power 17% of the capacity of a pacemaker.

Scientists tested the new technology on a pig and found out that the extra device caused no problems to the heart and that with further improvements of the materials used and in the way the energy is collected, someday mankind might be looking at a self-powered pacemaker.