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Abstract

Most of the more than one million cardiac pacemakers implanted each year have up to three leads that reach into the heart's chambers. The most modern pacemakers integrate all of the pacemaker functions into a small capsule that be directly implanted into the endocardium, resulting in what is known as a leadless cardiac pacemaker. However, these can typically only be used to stimulate a single chamber. By using intra-body communication, the operation of more than one leadless cardiac pacemaker can be synchronized, resulting in the ability to use this approach with multiple chambers of the heart. The paper by Mirko Maldari, Chadi Jabbour, Youcef Haddab, and Patricia Desgreys describes a system for such intra-body communication for pacemakers. The design and development of the system is described, as well as the optimization of the power usage of the system based on the signal waveform involved. The results demonstrated the telemetry-based synchronization of a dual-chamber leadless cardiac pacemaker system with minimum power consumption. This paper was based on one of the finalists for the 2021 URSI-France PhD Prize in Radio Science.