Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart

Really sucks a company doing something important like this is struggling. Such kind of company shouldn't need to worry about profits because we know how profit-minded medical breakthroughs look like.

> An Australian man with heart failure has become the first person in the world to walk out of a hospital with a total artificial heart implant.

So... Why don't they mention Carmat?

Yeah, I find that confusing too. Recently I heard in a YT video with a cardiologist (Medlife Crisis) that some people in the US lived more than 4 years with an artificial heart.

The article calls it the "world’s first implantable rotary blood pump that can act as a complete replacement for a human heart", so maybe there's a difference but the article is written as if this was the first artificial heart ever which it clearly isn't.

Blood oxygen sensors seem relatively cheap and low power.

I wonder if they could use that as the feedback mechanism.

Ideally if the sensors are small, low power, and cheap enough CO2 and lactic acid levels would also be good to check on to increase bloodflow.

That’s a good question! As a layman I would assume there’s no way to read/detect the hormones that would demand acceleration of the heartbeat? So one has to take it easy for the rest of their life? Or maybe there’s a way to manipulate it manually?

I would assume the kind of people who need a replacement heart are already on beta-blocker drugs, which clamp the peak heart-rate down significantly, so their body would already be used to a very limited heart-rate range.

It doesn't, neither do lvads

My friend had this pump pack attached to him (the same thing Dick Cheney had) and it was constant flow. His heart technically worked but it was so weak you could barely detect it. The pump was just constant circulation, no pumping.

Accelerometers to measure physical activity?

It's longer than 100 days already in their preclinical testing but they took it out because the patient found a heart transplant.

They say one upcoming improvement is wireless power via skin, somehow. At the moment the rechargeable battery lasts for five hours.

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I know it's crazy. Looks like a car part.

It is kinda cool looking. But if people can see it in your chest you are doing it wrong.

CNC'ed out of a block of titanium

It looks... very crude.

Just avoid getting into any bar brawls with Nausicaans.

(https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tapestry_(episode) although, the point of the episode was, in hindsight, the fight was the correct move)

Probably this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbioCor

They technically worked but they were expensive, painful, and basically just kept you alive on a bed. In essence they were like a more invasive version of the iron lung but required a team to maintain.

For this reason while you may have heard it used it various trials with "success" they were considered a failure in the end and rejected by the FDA. I've spoken to some people who worked on it and the feelings are pretty bittersweet.

Learning from this, Abiomed later brought a heart pump called the "Impella" to market which works to assist your heart instead of replace it. This device is cool for different reasons and can actually save peoples lives instead of merely prolong them a few years.

The new artificial heart in the OP is more sophisticated than the AbioCor, the science keeps improving.

The Jarvik-7 artificial heart was first implanted in a human patient in 1982. But those early designs were bulky, required external power sources, and were more of a temporary measure

Biology, and by extension medicine, only started to look like engineering in the last ~50 years because it requires serious advancements from many other fields of science. As in, you can't discover cells if you haven't invented a microscope yet. It's literally reverse engineering alien technology, in the sense that it's something that wasn't created by humans. And you can't really reverse engineer something when you don't have any tools to meaningfully interact with it and pick it apart.

I disagree - if you move fast and break things then people die. The human body is not a single well-understood system; everyone is different in subtle ways, which incidentally is why personalised medicine is becoming a thing.

How do you even compare those two things? And how do you separate technology from medicine? This statement seems like pure nonsense, hinging on a slippery definition of "technology" that in some contexts means "consumer gizmos," other contexts means "computers," and in yet other contexts means "Civilization tech tree."

It definitely feels that way, especially compared to fields like computing where progress is exponential. But with medicine, the stakes are so much higher... Every breakthrough has to go through years of testing, trials, and regulatory hurdles to make sure it's actually safe and effective

I hope it dramatically speeds up as AI improves. ASI is likely only scalable route to solving the medical issues that plague humanity.