Fault-Tolerant Energy Harvesting System for Prolonging Pacemaker Lifetime

Abstract

This paper focuses on prolonging the lifetime of pacemakers. Instead of just using a battery, a fault-tolerant energy harvesting system is designed; it is based on helical devices attached to the pacemaker leads. The design takes into consideration that the energy harvesting circuitry and a smaller battery will occupy the same area as the original battery. It is shown that the proposed circuit is able to supply the necessary power at 2.2V and tolerate the failure of any single component in the energy harvesting system in addition to several multiple failures. The small non-rechargeable battery will only supply current when the entire energy harvesting system fails.