While I'm all for the advancement of science, am I the only one who feels that concealing a vital sign of life is more or less a bad idea? If a person stops breathing, one of the first things a medical responder will do is check for a pulse. I imagine this will be important for the target market.
I could see these also being desired by prisoners wishing to escape confinement by hiding in an exiting truck or perhaps enemy combatants who hope to not be detected by heartbeat sensors(if those even really exist).
I wonder if any competitive shooters have one. Combine it with a closed, continuous carburetor for oxygenating the blood like in Sjambak[1], and you'd have quite the super-sniper.
I actually would have thought that the breathing cycle was more disruptive to a shot than the pulse.
I have also wondered if there is a place in that area for the use of gyroscopes. I can't remember if it was a news article or a novel, but my recollection is that shooting from helicopters employed gyros.
That's by far the easiest pulse to find. Though, from my training, I'm always feeling for breath while taking a pulse at the same time. For first aid reasons, usually the reason you take a pulse is to gauge whether you need to give CPR - and if they don't have a pulse to begin with, there's not really a point in CPR.
Plus, most people with existing medical conditions worth mentioning usually wear a bracelet. I feel this would fall into the same category.
In the general case, yes. But what about when the lack of pulse is caused by the machine? How will forced compression be handled by the machine? Blood may still be pumping, and breathing circulates air, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, CPR will not work if you have this machine instead of a heart, and it isn't working. But if you aren't breathing, it may work because CPR also activates the lungs and circulates air as you said.
I know that a company called VentraCor was testing pulseless artificial hearts in sheep at least eight years ago.
I just went looking for their website to post here, but apparently they've shut down. On further googling it turns out that they shut down in 2008 when three out of their 188 human test subjects dropped dead due to their hearts accidentally coming unplugged. Whoops.
Wikipedia says that this is literally true (check the last sentence) - it's not some kind of "Dick Cheney is a heartless bastard" joke. So please hold off on the downvotes (parent was at 0 when I posted).
Yeah, I wasn't going after the guy (this time), though I admit I originally learned that on the Daily Show and just did a quick confirmation-check before I posted.
Cheney has the Heartmate II (the same device the researchers used two of in this project). It is an axial flow as opposed to centrifugal pump. The first back non-pulsating heart assist device I could find is the hemopump: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemopump
don't think exercise is allowed.
But it would be cool if RPM's of rotor are automatically regulated with possibility of manual tuning.
if it was better than normal heart everyone would want to have it.
This a re-print of a PhysOrg.com article. I tried to find a non-PhysOrg.com site, but PhysOrg.com links to medicalxpress.com
I'm guessing PhysOrg.com is picking up on the fact that people are starting to see their writing as over-hyped and unreliable. Thus a new .com address. Shame, all they have to do is just write well and we'll like them. Talk about going the wrong way.
Isn't this in some ways performing better than a normal human heart? A pump with a constantly rotating mechanism seems more suitable to pumping liquid than a contracting bag of meat and muscle.
I'd give it about ten years before athletes get banned from getting a high performance "sport edition" heart.
You still need to power it somehow and anything that affects electrical systems might kill you.
In sports your heart is a lot less relevant than your lung capacity. You are more likely to end up with not enough oxygen than your heart not being able to pump your blood fast enough.
Which is another problem, there is a reason your heart doesn't beat at full speed: How well does a pump regulate the blood flow?
One could have a Nike-style sensor in the shoe, connected via bluetooth, with a manual override of some sort. Plus a smartphone-based accelerometer and gyro.
I could see these also being desired by prisoners wishing to escape confinement by hiding in an exiting truck or perhaps enemy combatants who hope to not be detected by heartbeat sensors(if those even really exist).