A portable system for autoregulation and wireless control of sensorized left ventricular assist devices

End stage heart failure patients could benefit from left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implantation as bridge to heart transplantation or as destination therapy. However, LVAD suffers from several limitations, including the presence of a battery as power supply, the need for cabled connection from inside to outside the patient, and the lack of autonomous adaptation to the patient metabolic demand during daily activity. The authors, in this wide scenario, aim to contribute to advancement of the LVAD therapy by developing the hardware and the firmware of a portable autoregulation unit (ARU), able to fulfill the needs of sensorized VAD in terms of physic/physiological data storing, continuous monitoring, wireless control from the external environment and automatic adaptation to patient activities trough the implementation of autoregulation algorithms. Moreover, in order to answer the rules and safety requirements for implantable biomedical devices, a user control interface (UCI), was developed and associated to the ARU for an external manual safe control. The ARU and UCI functionalities and autoregulation algorithms have been successfully tested on bench and on animal, with a response time of 1 s for activating autoregulation algorithms. Animal experiments showed as the presence of the ARU do not affect the animal cardiovascular system, giving a proof of concept of its applicability in vivo. (C) 2016 Nalecz Institute of Biocybemetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier Sp. z o.o. All rights reserved.