A usability test was conducted of two different manual defibrillators regularly used in the prehospital setting by emergency medical personnel. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate that design attention is needed to make manual defibrillators more error resistant and less hazardous to patient safety. Fourteen paramedics performed four tasks in a “laboratory” environment that included a c...

British Journal of General Practice, February 2014 107 IntroduCtIon Every year approximately 40 000 pacemakers and defibrillators are implanted in the UK amounting to one new implanted device per GP.1 Placements of pacemakers or implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) have become routine procedures and are generally associated with low complication rates. One of the most endangering comp...

Public training in the use of automated external defibrillators to treat out-of-hospital cardiac arrests has been receiving increased attention. The implementation of public access defibrillation programs has been the most significant intervention to improve survival in decades. Dramatic success came when we placed automated external defibrillators in the hands of the public to be utilized with...

I mplantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) are standard treatment for both secondary and primary prevention in patients with malignant ventricular arrhythmias. 2 Inappropriate shock therapy (IST) occurs in a significant proportion of ICD patients, despite newer generation devices and algorithms specifically employed to try and eliminate this. The frequency of IST in patients implanted with...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is common in patients who have implantable defibrillators and presents some unique challenges and opportunities. AF burden can be assessed more accurately, allowing for evaluation of therapy efficacy (drugs or ablation). It remains to be shown whether home monitoring of defibrillators to detect and treat AF more quickly can reduce cardiovascular and stroke end points. O...

udden cardiac death is a common problem, and increasing numbers of patients are surviving a first episode of a life threatening ventricular arrhythmia. In the absence of an acute myocardial infarction, patients who survive either ventricular fibrilla-tion or sustained ventricular tachycardia have a high risk of further episodes, which may be fatal. 1 Until recently, class I and class III antiar...

In recently years, Artificial Neural Networks have been studied extensively and applied in medical field, and have been demonstrated to have much better pattern recognition ability. In this chapter we present a VLSI chip to be implemented using 0.35 μm CMOS technology which is the implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICDs). Implantable cardioverter defibrillator is a device which monitors th...