Comparative analysis of piezo electric and accelerometer sensor for the design of rate adaptive pacemaker

Abstract This paper presents a comparative study of activity sensors: piezoelectric and accelerometer sensor, for the design of rate adaptive pacemaker. Activity sensors are incorporated with the demand mode pacemaker for achieving rate adaptiveness of the pacing. There is a conflict in selecting the activity sensors: accelerometer and piezoelectric. These sensors could monitor the physical activity of the patients and adapt the pacing rate to the needs of the activity of the patient. Implanting these physiological sensors into pacemakers made it possible for the physicians to individually optimize pacing parameters for each patient. Piezoelectric sensors may not response accurately for some kind of activities like cycling, walking down stairs etc. Accelerometer sensors have also the limitations for measuring prolonged duration activities. Clinically, accelerometer based activity sensors have dominated the piezoelectric based activity sensor for the design of rate adaptive pacemaker. Therefore, in this paper we have performed the frequency and time domain analysis for analyzing the technically suitable activity sensor for the design of rate adaptive pacemaker and it is found that accelerometer performs 90% faster than piezoelectric sensor.