http://phys.org/news/2014-04-heart-powers-pacemaker.html Source - Phys.org, Northwestern University Author - Megan Fellman Date - 10 April 2014
This is a great invention, but there are many things that I doubt. Firstly, if the heart uses a pacemaker to generate a beat and the pacemaker uses the hearts beat to generate a strain, what happens if the heart skips a beat or has palpitations, or even worse, starts to fail (because we all know, the heart does not always beat normally). The pacemaker would just start to shut down and in turn shutting the whole heart down abruptly. Probably, as a back up the pacemaker would still have batteries and therefore what is the point of making a device so sensitive and still using the main function ability of the device, as a backup. Secondly, the piezoelectric crystal, as long as a natural one (eg quarks) is used its okay. But the use of a homogenized piezoelectric crystal would be deadly because the crystal, as every other sensor, has a dead band, and every time the heart does not beat properly (as in does not supply enough strain). The pacemaker loses power and must shift to the back up. Wouldn’t it be easier to generate energy by using the hearts temperature difference rather than this.
