Self-Powered Piezoelectric Biosensing Harvester for Intracardiac Monitoring

This paper presents a novel, biocompatible, in-body energy harvesting piezoelectric biosensing device coupled to sensors for the detection of cardiac allograft vasculopathy. The computational modelling, implementation and measured results of the device are presented. The system includes an ultra-low power readout circuit that operates solely from power harvested from heartbeats. With a natural frequency of 1.52 Hz, the nonlinear piezoelectric harvester generates 56 μW in ex-vivo testing. The device has a 4 × 6 array of fabricated MEMS sensors, which provides over 80% accuracy in detection of heart geometry changes.