How do they work and for what purpose?
In: Technology
Let’s start with this: in real life, a defibrillator does NOT work on a heart that is not beating.
Your heart “beating” is caused by the muscles in your heart squeezing (contracting) to force blood through your blood vessels. The timing of each squeeze is synchronized and controlled using an electrical signal generated by special cells in your heart.
Sometimes that electrical signal gets messed up, and different parts of your heart will be squeezing at all different times, at the wrong times, and at the wrong pace. Certain messed up patterns of electrical stimulation and squeezing is called “fibrillation”.
Picture a string of lights, where each bulb is flashing on and off. “Normal” is for the bulbs to all be in sync, with all of them flashing on at the same time, and then all flashing off. But somehow, each bulb is on its own timer, and while they *should* all be set to the same time, they got out of sync and now lights are flickering on and off at random.
A defibrillator sends a huge electric shock through the heart, which overrides the signals its producing itself. This stops the fibrillation by causing one massive, fully-synchronized squeeze across the entire thing. For the string of lights, this is like surging energy through them so they all turn on and stay on.
The goal of this is that, after you remove that shock, your heart has a small break from the fibrillation freak out to try to re-establish a normal rhythm; the flashing string of lights were ALL on at the same time due to the surge, so hopefully they now all flash off at the same time next time, and stay in sync.
This is similar to a “pacemaker”. Some people’s special heart cells in charge of beginning the normal electrical signal and establishing the healthy beating rhythm don’t work. So we put a small device that helps give the first few cells a little jolt with the right rhythm, and the rest of the heart is able to follow suit.
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