Implantable cardiac sensors

Heart failure affects nearly a million people across the UK, with an additional 200,000 people diagnosed each year. It is a debilitating and life-changing condition, causing emergency hospital admissions, poor quality of life and ultimately early death. While there is no cure for heart failure currently, early diagnosis, precision medicine, and accurate post-treatment monitoring could work together to slow disease progression and improve long-term survival. Implantable cardiac sensors could also provide the opportunity to realise real-time recording of cardiac electrophysiology, in addition to inducing focal electrical stimulation, essential for minimally invasive monitoring of heart response to treatments, but most of them are rigid and their capability of spatiotemporal sensing & stimulation is limited. To solve the above problems, in this project, we will develop a bioresorbable ultra-flexible electronic patch that can be loaded into a syringe, injected through a capillary needle, with the sensing and stimulation region unrolled inside the chest and conformally deployed on the epicardium after
injection. It will enable stable spatiotemporal sensing of both cardiac electrical activity and mechanical motion by multifunctional sensor arrays for at least 3 months before full biodegradation. Combined with advanced data analysis, we see this development will add to our capabilities in heart failure monitoring, and ultimately promote next-generation highresolution minimally invasive sensing technology.