A patient at St. Francis Hospital in Rosyln, New York, Carol Kasyjanski, 61, has become the first recipient of St. Jude Medical’s wireless-enabled pacemaker, which the FDA approved in July. Kasyjanksi’s routine check-ups are significantly shorter now because the doctor can finish about 90 percent of the work before she arrives thanks to the data transmitted from the pacemaker to its online portal.
Dr. Steven Greenberg, the director of St. Francis’ Arrhythmia and Pacemaker Center, said the new technology would likely become the gold standard for pacemakers. The remote monitoring device connects to the server “at least” once a day to upload data or any alerts.
“In the future, these pacemakers may be placed not just for people with slow heartbeats. We may be monitoring high blood pressure, we may be measuring glucose, we may be monitoring heart failure,” Greenberg said. ”There are literally dozens of physiological parameters that now, with this wireless technology, we can leverage for the future of monitoring. So it is not just a rhythm monitor but a disease monitor.”
For more, check out the original report here
August 10th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
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August 10th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I had a first hand experience where one of my family member’s epicardial (place in stomach cavity and attached to outside of hear vs. transvenous) pacemaker wire broke and we didn’t know about it (luckily the person is not pace dependent). It would have been grea to have had the pacemaker sent us an alert that it’s not pacing because of a broken wire. Especially for pacer dependent people, since the wire probably doesn’t just brake suddenly, the change in conductivity due to cracking of wire would probably be detected early. I assume that the downside is that it uses more battery life and therefore time between surgeries is reduced.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:22 am
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