- 팀명 : Heart On a Chip
- 소속 : University of Pennsylvania
- 참가부문 : 첨단 의료서비스
- 개요

Medical devices are life-critical products whose success in performance is paramount to a patient’s health. Yet, from tragic failures and costly recalls, it is apparent that robust testing and verification standards are still lacking. For one, there are currently about 3 million individuals in the world who depend on pacemakers, which are surgically implanted devices that maintain proper heart rhythm. Pacemakers, complex as they are, are programmed with tens of thousands of lines of code, and are therefore inevitably prone to bugs. It may not come as a surprise then that between 1990 and 2000, over 200,000 pacemakers were recalled due to software issues.

The purpose of the Heart on a Chip (HOC), then, is to test pacemakers with the realism of clinical trials but without their risks, with the goal of finding software errors before patient implantation. This heart on a chip mimics the behavior of the heart and can be reconfigured to exhibit different arrhythmias. This virtual heart was built by using finite state machines to model the heart’s signal propagation properties for these different arrhythmias. Using code generation tools, these models were then directly translated to an FPGA hardware implementation, ensuring that the behavior of the models was retained.

This virtual heart is able to interface with pacemakers and react to them in a manner that mimics a real heart. It can both output heart beats to the pacemaker and react to paces from the pacemaker. A top-level user interface allows manufacturers, regulators, and cardiologists to view the results of this closed-loop, dynamic system. Such a system allows for interactions that no static heart model can provide, thus offering more robust testing methods for pacemakers and thereby increasing the safety of the patient. Using the HOC in such an environment serves as an example of the quality in testing and verification that is desperately needed in the realm of medical devices as a whole.