Heart disease claims millions of lives, with a third of these deaths occurring due to complications within weeks or months following a severe cardiac incident. To prevent these fatalities, a groundbreaking implantable device has been designed to monitor and treat heart disease and dysfunction immediately after such incidents. Remarkably, once its purpose is served, the device harmlessly decomposes within the body, thereby eliminating the need for its surgical removal.

A collaborative effort between researchers from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA) and George Washington University (Washington, DC, USA) has resulted in the creation of a soft, flexible device about the size of a postage stamp. The device comprises a variety of sensors and actuators, enabling more complicated analysis than conventional devices like pacemakers. It can be attached to different parts of the heart and constantly relay data to physicians, facilitating remote real-time patient monitoring. Moreover, due to its high transparency, it allows physicians to visually examine specific heart regions for diagnosis or treatment purposes.

Upon serving its clinical purpose, the device, made of FDA-approved biocompatible materials, harmlessly disintegrates into benign products. Much like dissolvable sutures, it degrades and eventually disappears, thanks to the body's natural biological processes. By avoiding complications due to surgical extraction and reducing infection risks, the device’s bioresorbable feature could improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare expenses.

The new device, when tested on small animal models, has been shown to offer functionalities surpassing those of a traditional pacemaker. Unlike a pacemaker, which provides a generalized view of the heart's functionality (whether it is beating or not), this temporary device provides a more detailed image. It can also restore normal heart rhythms, indicate well-functioning and poorly-functioning heart areas, and allows researchers to optically map key cardiac physical parameters due to its transparency. This aids in the in-depth study of heart functionality and the mechanisms of heart disease.

“Several serious complications, including atrial fibrillation and heart block, can follow cardiac surgeries or catheter-based therapies,” said Northwestern’s Igor Efimov, an experimental cardiologist who co-led the study. “Current post-surgical monitoring and treatment of these complications require more sophisticated technology than currently available. We hope our new device can close this gap in technology. Our transient electronic device can map electrical activity from numerous locations on the atria and then deliver electrical stimuli from many locations to stop atrial fibrillation as soon as it starts.”

“Many deaths that occur following heart surgery or a heart attack could be prevented if doctors had better tools to monitor and treat patients in the delicate weeks and months after these events take place,” added George Washington University’s Luyao Lu, who co-led the work with Efimov. “The tool developed in our work has great potential to address unmet needs in many programs of fundamental and translational cardiac research.”

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