The first ever pacemaker with wireless home monitoring has been installed in a patient. This will allow doctors to monitor the patients health as needed, instead of having them come in for frequent checkups.
The new version of the device downloads information about once a day to send to patients doctor, allowing them to react fairly quickly if something shows up that is abnormal or life threatening. Previously, doctors has no way to monitor a patient on a day to day basis, without having them in the hospital.
Geeze medical technology has come a long way.
Do you really think the Doc will monitor every day? Naw – just have the Nurse or receptionist do it.
Holly
http://www.thessayist.com
i hope its accurate. a persons life is at risk
That’s a great medical breakthrough. They can also intervene when necessary before major health problems occur.
Can you run DD-WRT or Tomato on it?
I work in cardiology and we have been doing this for 2 years now. It is called Medtronic Carelink
I’m glad you don’t work in my cardiology office. There’s a huge difference between Carelink and RF pacemakers.
can it be hacked and switch off remotely? hmmmm
Wireless defibrillators and Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy(CRT) devices have been around for several years now. Boston Scientific (formerly Guidant) released the first wireless device. The major 3 medical device companies (Medtronic, Boston Sci, and St. Jude) focused their efforts on bringing wireless defibrillators to market first. Patients that get a regular defib or CRT defib device are generally sicker than patients that have pacemakers. These patients benefit the most for wireless remote monitoring.
The logical evolution was to add RF to pacemakers and Medtronic has done that with their new device. There are a couple of advantages to having a wireless device:
1. The patient doesn’t have to do anything to be monitored. Wand based patient management systems required interaction from the patient. If the patient didn’t put the wand over the device then no data would be collected.
2. In the operating room you have an RF device then you don’t need a wand to program it. You must sterilize a wand during surgery, but you don’t need to sterilize an RF signal.
Doctors don’t typically monitor patients daily. The device monitors the patient daily, and the information is relayed to a server through a remote monitoring system in the patients home. The physician is then notified by the server if there’s a problem. Each company has their own system, but the concept is the same.
Actually, a german compant called Biotronik has had wireless devices in the USA since 2001 and in europe before that. Medtronic unsuccessfully sued them for years to halt the technology from coming to the states, at least until they could catch up. St Judes press release is untrue and will have to print an ambarrasing retraction.
Good point. Biotronik is such a small player in the US that I completely forgot about them.
Being #3 worldwide in pacemaker sales is not small in my opinion. Besides the article is “first ever” pacemaker, which is blatently false.
Notice I said that Biotronik is a small player in the US. I didn’t say anything about them being a small player worldwide.
how is the new wireless pacemaker better than the normal one? please reply
I have had a pacemaker inserted in me since 1999. I’ve not changed one yet as the pacemaker still functions normally. I am due to have a checkup of my pacemaker in January 2010. It is already ten years now and probably I need to change a new one. Do you think I can opt for a wireless pacemaker? What are the pros & cons? Your advice is greatly appreciated.