An Australian man just spent over three months walking around with a fully artificial titanium heart. Not a pacemaker. Not a heart assist device. A full-blown, metal-forged, magnetically powered replacement for that fragile biological pump everyone else is still using.
This makes him the first person in history to be discharged from a hospital with such a device ticking away inside him. Previously, every recipient of this particular mechanical heart remained under 24/7 medical supervision in the U.S. until they received a transplant. Apparently, this guy was cool enough to take his titanium heart on a field test in the real world.
Eventually, a human donor heart became available, and he swapped out his high-tech hardware for old-school organic tissue. Surgeons at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, handled both the implantation and the eventual transplant. A hundred days of living as a cybernetic pioneer, and now he’s recovering like a regular mortal.
The device, known as BiVACOR, has been implanted in six people worldwide, but no one had lasted this long outside a hospital before. That alone makes this case a milestone in cardiac technology.
Julian Smith, a cardiac surgeon at the Victorian Heart Institute, called the development “important.” Understatement of the year.
Sarah Aitken, a vascular surgeon at the University of Sydney, was more cautious, pointing out that the device still comes with major unknowns—like how well people can function with it long-term and, of course, whether this kind of futuristic engineering will ever be financially viable outside of experimental trials. “This kind of research is really challenging to do because it is very expensive,” she noted. No surprises there. High-risk, high-cost, high-tech—it checks all the usual boxes.
Joseph Rogers, president of the Texas Heart Institute, emphasized that this case gives researchers a more realistic picture of how the device performs. Unlike previous recipients who were hooked up to constant monitoring, this man was out in the wild, using his titanium heart in everyday life. Which, again, is absolutely insane when you stop to think about it.
BiVACOR, at the moment, is a temporary solution—a bridge to a transplant. But some cardiologists think it might eventually serve as a permanent replacement for people who don’t qualify for a donor heart, either due to age or other medical conditions. That’s a bold vision, but with nearly 7 million adults in the U.S. alone suffering from heart failure—and only about 4,500 heart transplants performed last year—demand is clearly outpacing supply. Either we grow more hearts, or we build them.
The Suspended Rotor: Because Regular Pumping Was Too Boring
BiVACOR isn’t just any mechanical heart. It’s a total replacement—no biological heart needed. Where traditional mechanical heart devices rely on a sack that contracts about 35 million times a year, BiVACOR skips the primitive squeezing altogether. Instead, it uses a magnetically suspended rotor to propel blood in steady pulses. One moving part. That’s it.
The whole thing runs on an external, battery-powered controller, connected to the body via a cord tunneled under the skin. Charge it at night. Walk around all day with a heart powered by the same basic principle as a high-performance turbine. The future is here, and it hums.
Biomedical engineer Daniel Timms invented this marvel and founded a company named—what else?—BiVACOR. With offices in both California and Australia, the company is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when flesh and metal start to blur.
Will this tech ever replace biological hearts altogether? Too soon to tell. But if you’re waiting for a future where people casually run on rechargeable titanium organs, congratulations—that future just survived its first hundred days.
Did You Know?
- The first artificial heart transplant patient survived 112 days in 1982. His heart? A monstrous, pneumatic device called the Jarvik-7, which required a constant air supply through tubes. Basically, he was tethered to life support 24/7.
- Pacemakers were once tested on dogs in the 1950s. The first human recipient in 1958 had his device fail within hours. He went on to receive 26 more pacemakers over his lifetime.
- Octopuses have three hearts. If that sounds like overkill, consider this: two pump blood to the gills, and one circulates it to the rest of the body. When they swim, the main heart actually stops beating. Lazy.
