The team’s demo system consisted of a 3-D printed heart with light traces triggered by programmed anomalies and sensor-simulator chips that detected the problems and sent data to the base station. The station then commanded the stimulators to release timed jolts to adjust the heart’s rhythm.

The team knows the demo is only the first step in a long process that will continue with future teams at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen through a Rice program known as VIP (for Vertically Integrated Projects). When Rice mentors anticipate projects are too complex for one team to handle in an academic year and are deemed important enough to put in the extra time and effort, they are passed to another set of students.


The pacemaker project certainly fits that description. “The heart is a very unique and harsh environment for circuitry,” Maguire said. “Having it all integrated is a huge research task, so for us, just developing a proof-of-concept is enough.”

Because there are no wires, the control unit continually dribbles power to and gathers data from the heart-embedded chips through radio frequency radiation, the same technology found in common RFID tags, Maguire said. The chips would deliver 25 nanojoule charges to stimulate heart muscles.

“It’s a master-slave network,” Maguire said. “Once you have these chips positioned within the heart and covered over by scar tissue, they would communicate with the aggregator — a bigger board that has an RFID reader, takes in all the data, processes it and relays it back to the chips.

“If things aren’t working out well in the heart, the aggregator would say, ‘Hey, guys, I need you to pace.’ They would continuously pace until the aggregator observed that things are good in all the chambers.”

Tapscott said that kind of network could become common as doctors seek better ways to gather real-time information from within their patients’ bodies.

Video:

https://youtu.be/nfZVPRQYSiY

Video produced by Brandon Martin/Rice University

About Rice:

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,970 undergraduates and 2,934 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

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