YOUNG INVENTOR PUTS HEART INTO WORK

Courtesy of Hamodia

      Benjamin Strauss is working on a new cardiac defibrillator that could be inserted near the heart only a few millimeters under the skin.

      The idea for “irescu”, a small defibrillator designed to prevent sudden cardiac arrest when implanted beneath the skin, occurred to Benjamin during a routine ambulance call in Bergenfield, N. J., last year. It was the second time in as many months that Strauss, a Bergenfield Volunteer Ambulance Corps crew chief, had responded to a heart related emergency involving the same patient.

      “He had a defibrillator implanted,” he said. “And it was supposed to work, and it didn’t.” It was also bulky. Strauss could see the defibrillator’s outline through the man’s skin. “You could see it was kind of cumbersome.” Said Strauss, a biomedical engineering major. “I figured … we could make it less cumbersome.”

      With that, Strauss set out to create for his senior project a smaller, less invasive implantable cardioverter defibrillator, a battery-powered gadget used to prevent sudden cardiac arrests in people who suffer from arrhythmia. The defibrillator is still a work in progress, but Strauss recently filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to secure a Patent for cardiagard, a device that will monitor the heart to detect and treat coronary artery disease – a condition that affects more than 15 million  Americans.

      The device is designed to be inserted into a subcutaneous layer over the heart. Electrodes attached to the wires can detect the slightest changes in the heart’s rhythms in the same way that an electrocardiogram does, he said.

      “There is no risk of causing a patient to go into cardiac arrest when they are actually being operated on because we are not touching the heart,” he said.

      “It’s such an amazing combination of both mechanical and electrical,” he said. “They are so dependent on each other, and I’ve found that to be pretty amazing.”