Pacemakers and 3D Printer - Old and New Medical Technology Innovations.

The title of this blog entry originally was meant to be: "How does technology affect our health?" This title may seem as I'm a technology hating, technophobe void of any desire to surrond myself with any form of tech. However, when discussing the affects of technology and our health I particularly mean the advancements in the industry that have made significant changes for the good. I won't be discussing 5G (yet) but I will be mainly focusing on medical innovations that have improved the lives of many!

Pacemakers

Those that haven't heard of a pacemaker before in the most basic terms it's simply a device used to send electrical impulses to the heart. This allows for the contraction of the heart muscles which in turn pump the blood around our bodies. Generally used for those that have issues related to their hearts beating differently. They were created and introduced in 1958 thanks to the great electrical engineer, Wilson Greatbatch. A pacemaker will consist of a sensor, generator and most importantly a battery. The sensors are what we've discussed recently, the electrodes. Without a battery, the generator cannot be powered and ceases to generate the electrodes which have contact with the heart itself due to wires.

More importantly the generator isn't any typical generator but rather a computerized generator capable of monitoring your heart beats, when an abormality with this is detected the generator will become sending the electrical impulses to the heart via the sensor, using its battery. Programming something of high importance such as a pacemaker is extremely high-risk. Bugs or any other discrepancies would be detrimental in these cases. There are also different programs that can be implemented based on the individual cases. A person's heart can be beating too slow and therefore would require a demand pacemaker. If a person's heart simple needs speeding up or slowing down, the rate-responsive pacemaker will be used. Rate-responsive pacemakers are more complex, rather than just monitoring heart rate they take in other factors such as blood temperatures and breathing. These different pacemakers will have different computerized generators due to the different requirements.

3D Printing

3D Printing has become extremely popular over the recent years. Anyone can get their hands on a 3D printer even for £300, it's important to mention that the commercial 3D printers that the average person can buy would of course not be capable of producing anything on the medical scale. 3D Printing can be used on such a scale depending on the printer and more importantly the 'ink'. The material used to print can be swapped out from normal plastic to living cells. This is referred to as bioprinting, one of the reasons to why we can use 3D printing in the medical industry. 

What could this mean?

Well, naturally there would be limitations but organs could be produced and potentially even bones. This would mean organ waiting lists could be reduced drastically and waiting times decreased giving more people the opportunities they so deserve without further potentially damaging their health. 

Benefits for Doctors

3D prints of organs of patients can be created and can be beneficial to doctors so that they can see what they will be operating on, this could easily decrease mistakes and allow some more preperation time for doctors before operation. This could be helpful for complicated surgeries where a patient's organ might not be normal or typical allowing the doctor to practice on a realistic scale model.