"A research team at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth worked with UT Health San Antonio (part of the University of Texas) and developed a new way to build a piezo-based harvesting transducer for these medical devices," writes EDN. "They used a combination of thin-film energy-conversion materials with a minimally invasive pacemaker mechanical design, as detailed in their paper 'Flexible Porous Piezoelectric Cantilever on a Pacemaker Lead for Compact Energy Harvesting.' They harnessed the kinetic energy of the lead wire which is attached to a beating heart, and then converted that energy into electricity to continually charge the batteries"