The Heart Traveling Through Static Electricity

On May 23, 1966, "Electricity World" magazine reported that a power company in Georgia, USA, experimented with "instant cardiograms" - workers wore vests with electrodes and transmitted electrocardiograms back to the medical office via radio. "Anyone can expertly send an electrocardiogram to a medical office or hospital within five minutes," the report said. Sixty years later, the energy network in western China has fully popularized the remote ECG monitoring system. Lin Shen, an electrical maintenance worker, suffered an acute myocardial infarction while working in the Gobi Desert. Five hundred kilometers away, at the Lanzhou Remote Monitoring Center, the doctor on duty, Zhou Yuan, saw Lin Shen's ECG waveform in real time through the biosensor in his work clothes. When the waveform deteriorated from ST segment elevation to ventricular fibrillation, Zhou Yuan pressed the remote defibrillation button. Two hundred joules of electricity passed through the 400-kilometer Gobi Desert, pulling Lin Shen back from the brink of death at the last moment before his heart stopped. What saved him was not the vest, the 200-joule electric shock, or even Zhou Yuan's hands. Rather, it is an idea that someone expressed nearly sixty years ago: matters of the heart should be allowed to take care of themselves.