by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | February 02, 2010
"If you can generate power for pacemakers, you can ... get a surgery every 20 years instead of 10," McAlpine notes.
Right now, McAlpine's team isn't sure how long the material would actually last in the body, but because it's inorganic, it should be fairly robust. "If you don't stress them too hard, and give them a rest period, they can continue for many millions of cycles," McAlpine notes.
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Yi Qi, a post-doc in McAlpine's lab, is hard at work on a functional prototype of the flexible PZT, and McAlpine expects one to be completed by the summer. Full commercial use might come within five to ten years.
In the paper, McAlpine's team used rubber, but he says they might choose plastic. "There are small differences between rubber and plastic, but plastic is easier to work with," he says.
Energy-making abilities of the substance are also nearly at target. Separate studies on pieozelectic crystals inserted into sneakers showed they could generate around 10 milliwatts. "That's getting close to the point where you're talking about being able to interface [with] usable power that came out in the end," McAlpine says.
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