| Summary: | Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the commonest cardiac arrhythmias encountered in modern medicine and is associated with deterioration in cardiac function and increased risk of stroke resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. The most recently published data indicates that AF: (i) has a prevalence of circa. 5.5 % in individuals over the age of 55 years; increasing to 17.8 % in patients greater than 85 years, (ii) confers up to a 500 % increase in the risk of related stroke, (iii) accounts for 30 - 40 % of all cardiovascular related hospital admissions; with incidence rates and associated treatment costs expected to double by 2050. For symptomatic patients where pharmacological intervention has failed, recent publications indicate that the advancement of new technologies and therapies may result from two specific lines of enquiry: (i) optimisation of the electrical defibrillation shock waveform for the lowest possible energy to achieve successful cardioversion (less than 1 J would potentially avoid the need for patient sedation) and (ii) investigation of the possible development of battery free passive implantable atrial defibrillators (thereby facilitating AF arrhythmia detection and cardioversion in a non-acute care setting).
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