Posted: 30th October 2013

Cardiac arrhythmias – irregularities in the heart rhythm – are common diseases that are expected to increase with the aging population. The typical treatment is by expensive surgical implantation of cardiac pacemakers, battery-powered medical devices which stimulate the heart to beat appropriately and need to be replaced every five to six years.

The VERIPACE project aims to lengthen the battery life of pacemakers and improve the patient’s quality of life. If successful, it will also mean that the patient needs fewer replacement surgeries, significantly reducing healthcare costs. VERIPACE will exploit the model-based framework for quantitative verification of pacemaker software recently developed within the ERC VERIWARE Advanced Grant (www.veriware.org), see http://www.veriware.org/pacemaker.php. 

The ERC Proof of Concept grant that has been awarded to VERIPACE was introduced by the ERC in March 2011 to establish the innovation potential of ideas arising from ERC-funded frontier research projects.