Medical Design and Outsourcing

  • Home
  • Medical Device Business
    • Mergers & Acquisitions
    • Financial
    • Regulatory
  • Applications
    • Cardiovascular
    • Devices
    • Imaging
    • Implantables
    • Medical Equipment
    • Orthopedic
    • Surgical
  • Technologies
    • Contract Manufacturing
    • Components
    • Electronics
    • Extrusions
    • Materials
    • Motion Control
    • Prototyping
    • Pumps
    • Tubing
  • Med Tech Resources
    • DeviceTalks Tuesdays
    • Digital Editions
    • eBooks
    • Manufacturer Search
    • Medical Device Handbook
    • MedTech 100 Index
    • Podcasts
    • Print Subscription
    • The Big 100
    • Webinars / Digital Events
    • Whitepapers
    • Video
  • 2022 Leadership in MedTech
    • 2022 Leadership Voting!
    • 2021 Winners
    • 2020 Winners
  • Women in Medtech

Black History Month: This inventor laid the foundation for today’s pacemakers

February 18, 2020 By Danielle Kirsh

otis-boykin

[Image from the National Inventors Hall of Fame]

Most people in medtech know of Earl Bakken’s contributions to pacemakers and cardiac rhythm devices. But without Otis Boykin, pacemakers wouldn’t have the pacing technology they do today.

An African-American inventor and engineer, Otis Boykin had a special interest in resistors. His mother died from heart failure when he was 1 year old. Thirty-one years later, he filed a patent for a resistor that paved the way for his most notable invention, the pacemaker control unit.

While working at Lisle, Ill.-based CTS Corp., Boykin filed a patent (U.S. Patent No. 2972726A) for a high-precision, wire-type electrical resistor that could be readily adapted to different space requirements and configurations. According to the patent, the resistor was designed to combine minimum inductive properties with minimum capacitive effects. It could also provide tolerances as low as required and could withstand “relatively great accelerations and shocks and great temperature changes” without breaking the fine resistance wire or causing other detrimental effects.

In the patent filing, which lists CTS as the assignee, Boykin said the resistor was made of lengths of resistance wire between 0.0006 in. and 0.010 in. in diameter and had resistance values of 0.05 ohm to several megohms. The patent also says the resistor could be made cheaply and quickly without wire strain. Most importantly, the high-precision, wire-type electrical resistor could enable pacemakers to have a time base — the repeated sending of uniform signals — at a much smaller scale.

Pacemakers are small devices that help the heart beat regularly by delivering a small electric stimulation that controls the heartbeat. The control units help identify the number of pulses per minute needed for each individual patient and the pulses become the number of beats per minute for the paced heart.

“Essentially, it helps to control a patient’s heart rate,” Gabriel Mouchawar, divisional VP of product development at Abbott, told Medical Design & Outsourcing. “The invention of the resistor and later the capacitor was essential in setting the time base for electronic devices, so the work of Otis Boykin was incredibly important to advance the technology.”

US2972726-drawings-page-1

Boykin’s pacemaker control unit patent [Click to enlarge and see all three pages]

The earliest pacemaker devices were external and needed to be plugged into a wall while patients used them. By 1957, Medtronic founder Earl Bakken, an electrical engineer by trade, developed the first battery-operated wearable pacemaker. Dr. Walton Lillehei, a pioneer of open-heart surgery, asked Bakken to build the pacemaker after a child who was connected to an AC-powered pacemaker died during a power failure.

The first pacemaker implantation surgery took place in Sweden in 1958. Innovations continued, many of them enabled by Boykin’s contribution.

“Pacemakers today are powerful devices with a number of benefits for patients. Many have computing power similar to early personal computers and can last more than 10 years on their internal battery,” Mouchawar said. “But all technology starts somewhere, and Otis Boykin’s work set the technology on a path that led us to where we find ourselves today.”

Boykin graduated from a Dallas high school as valedictorian in 1938. He went on to attend Fisk University and worked as a laboratory assistant in an aerospace lab, the National Inventors Hall of Fame reported. There, Boykin started to work on aircraft controls and various electronic resistors and became familiar with electrical components. He later moved to Chicago and worked in the P.J. Nilsen Research Lab where he eventually met Hal Fruth, with whom he would later start his Boykin-Fruth business, according to the Lemelson Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1952, Boykin-Fruth filed a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office related to a non-adjustable metal resistor made of wire or ribbon that could be coiled woven or formed as grids arranged to reduce self-induction, capacitance or variation with frequency, according to the patent filing. It was the start to a line of as many as 27 electrical device patents and eventually the resistor that would become a part of the pacemaker’s control unit.

“Otis’s work was instrumental in making the components of the pacemaker longer-lasting and manufacturable at a lower cost, which in turn helped increase access to the therapy to improve patient care. For companies like Abbott, the devices we offer today stand on a foundation built by people like Otis who made a remarkable impact on the field,” Mouchawar said.

Abbott (St. Jude Medical), Boston Scientific and Medtronic lead the way in pacemaker development today. Abbott has a number of cardiac rhythm management devices in its portfolio, including pacemakers, insertable cardiac monitors, quadripolar LV leads and CRT-Ds. Medtronic has four pacemakers in its current offerings with seven others in its past and Boston Scientific has five of its own pacemakers on the market.

“Boykin’s work was critical to developing a pacemaker generator that was efficient, compact and resilient over time. Several decades of iteration on his foundational work have brought us rate-adaptive pacing, the ability to track the atrium and address complete heart block and rate responsiveness features that augment heart rate commensurate with physical activity,” a spokesperson at Boston Scientific told MDO.

boykin-resistor-invention

Boykin’s first electronic resistor patent, filed in 1952 [Click to enlarge]

Because of Boykin’s invention, companies like Boston Scientific have also been able to develop leadless pacemakers, which are less invasive and 90% smaller than transvenous pacemakers, according to the American College of Cardiology. While leadless pacemakers only provide single-chamber ventricular pacing and lack defibrillation capacity, they eliminate complications that arise with transvenous pacemakers and leads, including pocket infections, hematoma, lead dislodgment and lead fracture.

Pacemakers are getting smaller and less invasive and the future of the device is on track to becoming even smaller with new power options and remote monitoring. Boston Scientific projects that there will be more opportunities in the future for modular rhythm management with multiple device communicating with one another. Pacemakers could also be implanted at different time intervals as a patient’s condition changes. Moreover, the company predicts that pacemakers could become energy-harvesting, meaning that instead of relying on batteries to power, they could use the motion of the heart or blood chemicals as a power source.

Mouchawar at Abbott thinks the next generation of pacemakers offered to patients will be smaller, last longer and offer new remote monitoring capabilities through Bluetooth connections to a patient’s smartphone. “How the devices deliver care will offer one set of advancement, while new ways for patients to stay connected to their hospital or clinic will offer another avenue for companies like Abbott to continue improving outcomes.”

17 Black innovators who made medtech better >>

Related Articles Read More >

Medical device VCs give long-term pandemic perspectives
DIY ventilators? Not unless there’s a zombie apocalypse.
nurses-week
7 innovations that made nurses’ jobs easier
Elaine Messa and Heather Howell NSF International women in medtech
5 leadership lessons from women in medtech

DeviceTalks Weekly.

June 24, 2022
How innovative design, commercial strategy is building Cala Trio’s bioelectronic medicine market
See More >

MDO Digital Edition

Digital Edition

Subscribe to Medical Design & Outsourcing. Bookmark, share and interact with the leading medical design engineering magazine today.

MEDTECH 100 INDEX

Medtech 100 logo
Market Summary > Current Price
The MedTech 100 is a financial index calculated using the BIG100 companies covered in Medical Design and Outsourcing.
DeviceTalks

DeviceTalks is a conversation among medical technology leaders. It's events, podcasts, webinars and one-on-one exchanges of ideas & insights.

DeviceTalks

New MedTech Resource

Medical Tubing

Enewsletter Subscriptions

Enewsletter Subscriptions

MassDevice

Mass Device

The Medical Device Business Journal. MassDevice is the leading medical device news business journal telling the stories of the devices that save lives.

Visit Website
MDO ad
Medical Design and Outsourcing
  • MassDevice
  • DeviceTalks
  • MedTech 100 Index
  • Medical Tubing + Extrusion
  • Drug Delivery Business News
  • Drug Discovery & Development
  • Pharmaceutical Processing World
  • R&D World
  • About Us/Contact
  • Advertise With Us
  • Subscribe to Print Magazine
  • Subscribe to E-newsletter
  • Attend our Monthly Webinars
  • Listen to our Weekly Podcasts
  • Join our DeviceTalks Tuesdays Discussion

Copyright © 2022 WTWH Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of WTWH Media LLC. Site Map | Privacy Policy | RSS

Search Medical Design & Outsourcing

  • Home
  • Medical Device Business
    • Mergers & Acquisitions
    • Financial
    • Regulatory
  • Applications
    • Cardiovascular
    • Devices
    • Imaging
    • Implantables
    • Medical Equipment
    • Orthopedic
    • Surgical
  • Technologies
    • Contract Manufacturing
    • Components
    • Electronics
    • Extrusions
    • Materials
    • Motion Control
    • Prototyping
    • Pumps
    • Tubing
  • Med Tech Resources
    • DeviceTalks Tuesdays
    • Digital Editions
    • eBooks
    • Manufacturer Search
    • Medical Device Handbook
    • MedTech 100 Index
    • Podcasts
    • Print Subscription
    • The Big 100
    • Webinars / Digital Events
    • Whitepapers
    • Video
  • 2022 Leadership in MedTech
    • 2022 Leadership Voting!
    • 2021 Winners
    • 2020 Winners
  • Women in Medtech