While electric cardiac defibrillators are successful life-saving devices that have been used in practice for many years now, they are extremely shocking (forgive the pun) and potentially harmful to cardiac tissue when they fire. A new approach, that of optical defibrillation, may be a lot more tender and maybe even pleasant to get an arrhythmic heart into a normal rhythm.
We’ve written about early attempts to use light to successfully influence the beating of animal hearts before (see flashbacks below), but the new study from Johns Hopkins University points to this approach also working on humans.
