A broken ❤️

Is one that's not beating!

The work of engineers drives change in the world we live in.

From homes, to technology, to communication, and transportation; every engineer has their direct impact in society and in every aspect of people's lives.

A particular field that engineers have helped develop for centuries past and centuries to come is healthcare. Using breakthrough technologies to create devices that help people to continue living with a high quality of life is a new area in engineering that is growing ever so rapidly.

To better understand and appreciate this; I took on a project of programming and designing a pacemaker.

‍A pacemaker is an electric device that is surgically implanted in the patient's chest to help control the heartbeat.

The FRDM K64F microcontroller was used for the pacemaker and the Nucleo F446RE microcontroller was used to emulate the heart. Matlab Simulink was used to program the bradycardia therapy modes. An interactive user device controller-monitor was also programmed using Python (Tkinter) in order to allow for communication with the pacemaker as well pacing mode parameter adjustments to be made by the physician.

How it works

A brief description of how the system is designed to work is as follows:

1. The physician gains access to the DCM and registers using a username and password.
2. An option of 2 windows appears in which the physician can either check the pacemaker communication window to verify it is functioning properly or a programmable parameters window in which the physician can choose between the various pacing modes and make value adjustments.
3. The DCM communicates serially with the pacemaker in order to update values, communicate, and retrieve electrogram data real-time.
4. Everything is monitored and verified using a software called Heartview.

A model-driven engineering approach was used in a "construction-through-correctness" manner. The final design was built in a modular fashion for easy verification and modification.

Takeaways

Working on this project was a technical challenge as there were a lot of moving parts. However, one of the main lessons that I can say I have learned throughout the development of this project is the ethical responsibility that comes with being an engineer. As an engineer, ensuring that the work you do is done as best as possible with the resources given is of utmost importance.

This project is a perfect example of that; developing and building an electric device which a patient's life and wellbeing depends on is an enormous responsibility which should not be taken lightly.

In this case, the pacemaker perfectly represents how deeply rooted the engineers work is and the impact they have within society.