In 1956, while building an oscillator to record heart sounds, Wilson Greatbatch inadvertently installed a resistor with the wrong resistance. It began to pulse at a steady pace—a sound similar to that ...

When nature devised the delicate, low-voltage electrical system that keeps a human heart beating at about 70 times a minute, it did not anticipate interference from doctors’ diathermy machines, radio ...

The patients who made the biggest news at last week’s meeting of the American Heart Association in Miami were those who can talk about their “tickers” without being cute. They are the growing number, ...

Researchers at Rice University and the Texas Heart Institute have created the internal components for a battery-free pacemaker, designed to be inserted directly into the heart and free of wires. The ...

At his research laboratory at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, longtime Newton resident Dr. Paul Zoll (1911-1999) developed several first-in-the–world devices that were the ancestors of today’s basic ...

Defibrillators use electrical shocks to restore a normal heart rate, especially in cases of life threatening arrhythmias or sudden cardiac arrest, while pacemakers use low-energy electrical pulses to ...

The device also dissolves once it is no longer needed, making invasive removal a thing of the past.