Cardiac Pacemakers: A Closer Look at Technological Innovations

The use of technology in medical sciences, specifically the use of embedded technology to correct dysfunctional organs closer to their natural state, found its place with the great cardiac surgeons from the early 1900’s like Dr. Vivien Thomas and Dr. Christiaan Barnard. The consistent leaps in the treatment of diverse, more frequent, or rare heart conditions enabled other fields of science and technology to partner and collaborate to build diverse solutions achieving long-term survival for patients of all ages. The early century pioneering of Dr. Albert S. Hyman (Harvard trained cardiologist from New York) to late century ingenuity of Dr. Jose Carlos Pachón-Mateos (University of São Paulo – USP trained cardiologist) who designed and built cardiac pacing and defibrillation devices themselves, to Biotronik SE & CO., KG and Medtronic plc, in the vanguard of researching, designing and providing state of the art pacemakers for more than fifty years, accelerating and expanding the adoption of cardiac pacemaker devices even in high-risk patients (with the incidence of various cardiovascular diseases rising across the globe. In the todays day and age, the ubiquity of pacemakers is likely to pique the interest of many who, with a quick search on the internet, will find information on websites like the great medical school Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, popular online medical like Medicine Plus, or even Wikipedia, all of them telling us that pacemakers are devices that are surgically implanted to sustain our hearts’ electrical system. In this article, we will briefly navigate the recent history of pacemakers and respective changes in manufacturing and materials and will illustrate the incredible significance of these devices and their makers. The goal of this text is to draw the profile of the fast-paced innovations included in this famous yet misunderstood device, as well as the changes in risk and the consequences faced in the near future.