A revolutionary cardiac monitor which can be inserted under the skin to monitor heart rhythms has won an Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Innovation Award.
The Reveal LINQ Insertable Cardiac Monitor (ICM) created by Medtronic has this year won the Healthcare Technology category.
A team who specialise in shrinking medical devices to make them not only radically smaller, but also more efficient and more advanced versions of their ‘larger’ counterparts, decided to take on a new challenge to make a heart monitor that could be inserted under the skin quickly and leave no traces, meaning that heart rhythm could be monitored over long periods of time.
The Reveal LINQ ICM is the result. It is part of a powerful system that allows medical professionals to continuously and wirelessly monitor a patient’s heart for up to three years, ensuring any changes in their heart rhythm are spotted immediately and that a diagnosis can be made.
Heart rhythm disorders, also called arrhythmias, occur when there is a malfunction in the heart’s electrical impulses that co-ordinate how it beats. In some cases abnormal heart rhythms are not serious or in any way life threatening and can be addressed with simple lifestyle changes, like increasing exercise or changing diet. In other cases, when a patient’s wellbeing is seriously impacted, for example when a patient experiences recurrent fainting or palpitations, an unexplained stroke or atrial fibrillation, arrhythmias can be more serious and potentially life threatening.
Finding atrial fibrillation in patients who have had strokes of undetermined causes is a bit like playing hide-and-seek – sometimes, they can be impossible to find.
Medtronic scooped the award after beating four other shortlisted entries selected from over 400 entries from 22 countries. The other shortlisted entries came from the Renfrew Group and Dr Montmort University, Toshiba Medical, The Sure Chill Company and the Institute for Infocomm Research.
William Webb, IET president, said: “The IET Innovation Awards celebrate the best in global innovation, highlighting the rapid and exciting pace of development in today’s engineering and technology industry. Congratulations to the Medtronic team for their win. They were selected from a highly-impressive set of global innovations as one of the most-forward-thinking, pioneering innovations in the field.
Chris Garland from Medtronic added: “We are really pleased to have won this award. It is great to receive such recognition from an institution as renowned and long-running as the IET. Hopefully this award will mean that we can continue to invest in innovation that extends life for patients around the world, for many years.”