Australian Patent Application 2026902174
Heart to Beat
Individual Cardiac Rhythmic Identity Recovery System
Filed 15 March 2026 · Provisional · Alexander Thomas Cooper-Rye
premise
Nobody owns music. Nobody owns the beat of a heart beating truly.
Each human heart possesses an intrinsic rhythmic identity — a native pattern of
inter-beat interval relationships that is individual, diagnostically recoverable, and
therapeutically restorable. The healthy heart does not beat like a metronome. It beats
in additive-meter polyrhythmic structures — the same category of asymmetric rhythm
that West African drumming traditions independently classified, because the heart and
the drum were always describing the same phenomenon from different distances.
Four decades of heart rate variability research confirm that rhythmic complexity
characterises healthy hearts and rhythmic rigidity characterises failing ones.
Yet every pacemaker ever built imposes regularity. The present invention proposes
the complete correction: recover the individual heart's native rhythmic signature,
and restore it.
the invention
diagnostic system
Recovers the patient's native Rhythmic Identity Profile from any available cardiac
data — pre-implantation recordings, residual intrinsic beats between paced events,
or historical ECG — using ethnomusicological rhythm classification. The analysis is
biological in subject and musicological only in method.
therapeutic system
A polyrhythmic timing engine operating in the envelope domain generates pacing intervals
that restore the patient's recovered rhythmic signature across five simultaneous axes:
respiratory phase, autonomic tone, activity level, circadian state, and residual intrinsic
rhythm feedback. Implementable as a firmware update to existing pacemaker hardware.
adaptive rhythmic capacity
A novel cardiac health metric measuring the range of rhythmic structures the heart can
sustain while maintaining haemodynamic adequacy. The therapeutic goal is rehabilitation,
not prosthesis — progressively restoring the heart's own rhythmic range, not
permanently imposing an external pattern. The pacemaker is a scaffold, not a replacement.
the rockface principle
The pulse wave does not merely pass through tissue; it mechanically deforms it with every
heartbeat. Over billions of cardiac cycles, these deformations produce cumulative structural
remodelling that encodes the heart's rhythmic history in the morphology of the tissues it
has been pulsing against. The body is a distributed recording medium for cardiac rhythm.
Retinal vasculature, gingival tissue, terminal capillary beds of the hands and feet —
these are rockfaces etched by an ocean. The recording medium outlasts the instrument.
engineering genealogy
Three Australian engineering principles, each independently proven, converge on the same organ.
1926
Pacemaker — Lidwill & Booth, Sydney. Inject electricity into the heart.
1978
Cochlear implant — Clark, Melbourne. Pattern the electricity after the native signal's structure.
1992
Wi-Fi — O'Sullivan & CSIRO. Reconstruct the original signal from degraded fragments.
2026
Heart to Beat — Cooper-Rye, Newcastle. Recover the signal. Pattern the electricity. Deliver it home.
the line
The present invention is the optometrist's chair, not the physics of light.
The core phenomenon — that hearts have individual rhythmic identities — is a natural
phenomenon and is not claimed as such. What is claimed is the diagnostic method for
recovering it, the system for restoring it, and the metric for measuring therapeutic
progress. Consistent with NRDC v Commissioner of Patents [1959] HCA 67,
D'Arcy v Myriad Genetics [2015] HCA 35, and Ariosa Diagnostics v
Sequenom [2021] FCAFC 101.
The heart was beating before the word "regular" existed.
This patent proposes we stop correcting it and start listening.
He proved the heart listens to electricity.
This specification proposes that we learn what song it was already singing.
cardiac pacing
rhythmic identity
heart rate variability
polyrhythmic
biomimetic
rockface principle
adaptive rhythmic capacity
australian patent
2026902174
firmware
ethnomusicological
envelope domain