This project is one of the senior capstone projects for electrical engineering students at Northern Arizona University (NAU) that are trying to achieve a bachelors of engineering in the spring of 2021.
The goal of this project is to create a bioelectric generator to recharge pacemaker batteries to eliminate the need for invasive, expensive, and sometimes risky battery replacement surgeries. The sponsor and customer for this project is Gore. Working side by side with Gore is team Ionic Hearts; a team of five electrical engineering students at NAU. Read more about the tea on the Team Members page.
To view the specific project requirements, please click

Project Design

The figure above shows how our project is broken up in a way that is similar to the system architecture. It is important to note that some of this is inside of the body, and the rest of it is outside of the body in a separate system. The power supply, transmitter, raspberry pi, and display are outside of the body while the receiver, seeeduino, charge cut-off circuit, battery, bluetooth transmitter, and pacemaker are inside of the body. The arrows generally depict what susbsystem has to connect to each other subsystem. The Seeeduino gets power from the receiver, battery charge level from the cut-off circuit, and relays that data via Bluetooth for example.

Utilized Hardware

Our team sponsor is Gore. Founded more than 60 years ago by Bill and Vieve Gore, their award-winning enterprise makes industry-leading products while employing over 11,000 Associates worldwide. Technology is at the center of Gore’s solutions, particularly expanded PTFE, a versatile polymer that they discovered. Built upon the principles of freedom, fairness, commitment and respect for the enterprise’s waterline, Gore has a distinctive company culture in which highly motivated people thrive. (Above excerpt taken from Gore.com)