Find Shaetrun Pathmanathan on
Principal Supervisor: Prof Mahinda Vilathgamuwa
Associate Supervisor: A/Prof Geoff Walker
Project Overview
A growing heart failure population necessitates medical interventions beyond which waiting on heart donors can provide.
Mechanical interventions to the likes of Ventricular Assist Devices (VAD) have proven a preliminarily successful alternative bridging therapy until a matching donor was found.
Further developments have allowed patients to use VADs as a destination therapy, potentially avoiding life threatening circumstances while on the waiting list.
However, the percutaneous driveline required to power, control and measure the implanted VAD’s performance is prone to cultivating fatal infections at it’s exit site.
Replacing this with an Inductive Power Transfer Link is a promising alternative. For an Inductively Powered Link to function flexibly to Power demand, a feedback loop is required.
This feedback loop, must perform considering the delays that are inherent in a Wireless Power Transfer system and also, with what bodily delays may be introduced.
Considering safe exposure limits of Electromagnetic waves inside the human body, the development of Wireless Power Transfer assistive feedback communications is explored.
The timed performance of this link is evaluated via mock environment experiments, estimations and simulations.