We are a multidisciplinary team aiming to design, prototype and test our Total Artificial Heart. Every day you wake up able to do something as simple as walk a few steps, 26 million people around the world don't have this luxury due to heart failure, with 50,000 people having end-stage failure and needing a transplant to survive. With symptoms like severe fatigue, persistent coughing, rapid weight gain from fluid retention, and difficulty breathing, the impact on day-to-day life is severe. The best solution is a heart transplant, but with only 6,000 transplants happening annually, the other 44,000 need a solution, and need it now!
Our aim is to help these people live a normal life by creating a device to pump blood when the heart can’t. The problem? Blood is very sensitive to shear stresses and stagnation, and both can cause life-threatening complications like stroke and haemolysis. Our aim is to limit these as much as possible while continuing to deliver the blood in a pulsatile manner at the correct pressures.
One of the main problems with current TAH’s is infections from the drive line (pneumatic tubes that pass through the skin). Our design aims to eliminate this problem by using a TET system to transfer power through the skin wirelessly to our motor. With the help of RS Student Fund we have been able to progress with our prototyping, an essential part of the process to help verify our design for the competition we compete in every year. This competition is the Heart Hackathon and is an amazing place where students come together to share their innovation in TAH’s, and held every year at the ISMCS (International Society for Mechanical Circulatory Support) conference.
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