The idea was that Elliott, who had won plaudits as the head of orthopedic joint maker Zimmer Holdings, could fix up a company whose main businesses in heart stents and implanted defibrillators, used to prevent sudden cardiac death, were running into significant road blocks.
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Some 20 million Americans now walk around embedded with high-tech gear: artificial hips and knee joints, pacemakers, heart defibrillators and more.
Biotronik claims it was first to include wireless, automated data transmission in defibrillators and pacemakers.
He plans to bundle wireless patient-monitoring capabilities into all of his cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers.
Heart-rhythm devices, including defibrillators and leads, made up more than 50% of St.
Esther Takeuchi gave the world the batteries that make it possible to implant defibrillators and never have to take them out.
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Despite defibrillators and other modern gear, survival rates after cardiac arrest are around 30% inside hospitals and 5% or so outside of them.
Last week, the company announced better than expected sales, mostly due to its products that help the heart, such as defibrillators and pacemakers.
Buying Guidant fixes that problem, because the company has traditionally been a big player in the market for pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD).
But Boston Scientific was hurt by exactly those kinds of pressures, as controversies over the recall of some defibrillators and the usefulness of stents hurt its core businesses.
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Jude Medical (nyse: STJ - news - people ), a smaller maker of defibrillators and pacemakers that he feels has been constrained by a too-tiny sales force.
Back in September, the Government Accountability Office issued a report which warned that computerized implanted defibrillators and insulin pumps could be vulnerable to hacking, and pose a safety threat, and it asked the FDA to address the issue.
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Guidant is developing a wireless "advanced patient management" system for defibrillators, and is evaluating whether heart rate variability is a good indicator of attacks.
Now, these two families have joined cardiologist Dr. Terry Gordon and lawmakers to push for a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to mandate federal funding for defibrillators in primary and secondary schools across the nation.
CNN: Cardiac-arrest victims' parents push for school defibrillators
They make record time in a fleet of small cars, ambu-cycles, ambu-tractors and ambu-boats -- all equipped with heart defibrillators, breathing tubes, burn wraps and maternity kits.
Runnymede council has worked with the ambulance service to place two defibrillators in Addlestone and three across Thorpe, Chertsey and Egham.
Controversy has swirled about the way Guidant disclosed flaws in its defibrillators to doctors and patients, and Guidant has issued several big device recalls, hurting sales.
Despite faster emergency squads, deployment of automated defibrillators at airports and other public places, and improvements in cardiopulmonary resuscitation techniques, fewer than 10% of the 300, 000 Americans who suffer cardiac arrest each year survive long enough to leave the hospital a rate that hasn't budged much over the years.
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The money is often wasted, for example on billiard tables, barbecues and, in one case, defibrillators.
Last year the charity supplied 55 defibrillators to high schools and sports clubs across the island.
The initiative aims to increase the number of defibrillators in public places and offer CPR training.
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Emergency medical personnel will be stationed in the subways, in medical tents, and will patrol on bicycles carrying defibrillators.
The couples successfully lobbied in their home states of Ohio and New York to pass laws mandating defibrillators in schools.
CNN: Cardiac-arrest victims' parents push for school defibrillators
Researchers looked at 62 patients with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, devices that monitor heart rhythms and emit painful shocks in response to dangerous rhythms.
In a study presented last fall at the annual heart association meeting, a team of heart experts from Johns Hopkins University reported evidence that at least 522 lives can be saved annually in the United States and Canada by the widespread placement of automated external defibrillators.
CNN: Cardiac-arrest victims' parents push for school defibrillators
This is not just a marketing slogan: all products, from heart defibrillators to coffee machines, must become easy and intuitive to use.
They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents.
An estimated 12 young people die each week from SADS - and the Foundation argues that some lives could be saved if more defibrillators were available (there are 16 distributed around the Parliamentary estate).
Additional work is being done at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, part of the FDA. Researchers there have created a "virtual family" of adults and children in order to study how best to implant medical devices in children, such as heart defibrillators.
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