14 DAY TRIAL // Experts in the industry have been working on producing flexible electronics for many years. Gaining this ability could see the creation of new classes of devices, capable of being bent and twisted according to desire, while still maintaining their function. An advancement in this direction has been recently reached by a team including researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The group successfully created and tested a new, advanced pacemaker on the beating heart of a pig. The implant is considerably smaller than the normal one, and also features sheets of flexible electronics, LiveScience reports.
This is the first time such devices have been placed inside a living organism. The thing about these electronics is that they can basically be wrapped around all organs in a body, like a shroud. They could therefore be made into anything from pacemakers to brain implants, with the same degree of success. The foundation of the new device is a fingertip-sized sheet of plastic featuring various layers of electronics. These layers are made entirely out very small ribbons of flexible silicon, and feature 288 measuring points on their overall surface.
When the layout of the circuitry presses these points against an organ, they can easily record the electrical activity going on at that particular location, scientists say. In the experiments they conducted on the living pig, the researchers managed to obtain a high-detail map of the electrical activity in the organ by using their new pacemaker. This approach is highly-advanced stuff when compared to existing methods of studying organ electricity, which rely on placing large electrodes on or around the target organ, and then collecting data from only a few points.
“Instead of 100 electrodes, you can put in thousands of them; instead of covering a tiny region, you can cover a large one. We did the first experiment in the heart, because the signals in the heart are about 1,000 times bigger than brain signals,” explains UP professor Brain Litt, who was also a researcher on the new study. The expert explains that the new implants could, for example, be used in ablating portions of the heart that no longer meet specifications. At this point, this is one of the most common treatments for arrhythmia, a condition in which the heart steps out of rhythm when beating. Details of the new pacemaker appear in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Science Translational Medicine.