An autoregulation unit for enabling adaptive control of sensorized left ventricular assist device

This paper describes an integrated system for facing heart failures (HF) in an innovative way. Existing left ventricular assist devices (LVAD or VAD) are usually devoted to blood pumping without the possibility to adapt the speed to patient conditions during everyday activities. This is essentially due to the lack of sensorization, bulkiness, and the need of relying on device-specific controllers with reduced computing ability for the existing ventricular assist systems. In this work, an innovative integrated and portable device, the ARU, is presented for enhancing VADs applicability as a long-term solution to HF. The ARU is an universal device able to fulfill with the needs of sensorized VADs in terms of data storing, continuous monitoring, autoregulation and adaptation to patient condition changes during daily activities. The ARU is able to wirelessly interface wearable devices for offering additional monitoring features from remote. The ARU functionalities on bench have been tested by the interfacing with a sensorized VAD platform in order to prove the feasibility of the approach. Experiments of local and remote VAD speed changes and autoregulation algorithms have been successfully tested showing response time of 1 s.