Development of an Auto Calibration Method for the Implantable Blood Pressure Sensor in the Undulation pump ventricular assist device (UPVAD)

Abstract

Development of an implantable artificial heart is very important to save cardiac disease patients. An undulation pump ventricular assist device (UPVAD) could be a good candidate because of the compact size. Although the implantation improves patient’s quality of life (QOL) considerably, several implications hamper the development of an implantable artificial heart. The difficulty in blood pressure measurement is the one of the implications to be solved. We have developed the im-plantable absolute pressure sensor to be integrated into a UPVAD and the algorithm to infer the blood pressure referred to gauge pressure. Noble feature of the algorithm is autonomous compensation of the offset drift with the pressure sensor in time. Thus the blood pressure could be controlled precisely with the implantable UPVAD even if the pressure sensor exhibited certain drift characteristics. Animal experiment demonstrated the effectiveness in compensating the offset drift