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boiling water again
(quokk.au)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

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now that is a novel use of piezoelectricity. whoever thought of that needs many sloppy kisses from many cats
personally i think they just need to design for the battery run at 80% capacity and let it wear down. although i can see why they might need to periodically replace a foreign object implanted in the body. i had to get all the titanium plates and screws removed eventually because ow.
Yeah. Unfortunately even rechargeable pacemakers are extremely rare - almost all of them just expect that you'll have to replace the battery every several years (I think the average is 5?), which in the long run isn't terrible but still. Rechargeable batteries self-discharge far too much and as a result require quite frequent recharging so are far from ideal for implantation, although not having to undergo regular surgery to replace the battery is obviously a highly desirable outcome. The idea with internal power generation is to bridge the gap between the two and allow a person to go for far longer without the need for invasive surgery (there's a whole sidebar here about rechargeable battery chemistry not being ideal for implantation) but without the drawbacks inherent to rechargeable chemistries.
our experience was 7, but that was probably more because it was powering a DBS and not an actual pacemaker (i'm guessing lower charge draw over longer period of time) and it was time to implant a probe on the other side of the brain.