Swiss researchers are taking a page from their country’s most iconic products to change how pacemakers are powered inside the body.

A team of biomedical engineers at the University of Bern is using rotation-based energy harvesting systems from wristwatches and using them to capture kinetic motion in the body to power pacemakers. The technology works by harvesting energy from motion and use it to power an implanted pacemaker, much the way kinetic wristwatches use motion to automatically wind a spring.

Early prototypes combined components of an automatic watch with off-the-shelf pacemaker technology, and the implants have fared well so far in tests in pigs.

"We have shown that it is possible to pace the heart using the power of its own motion," Bern University’s Adrian Zurbuchen said during a presentation at this year’s European Society of Cardiology conference in Spain.

And Zurbuchen’s team isn’t stopping there. They’re looking to condense the implants even smaller to eliminate leads as well.

"The next step in our prototype is to integrate both the electronic circuit for energy storage and the custom-made pacemaker directly into the harvesting device," Zurbuchen added. "This will eliminate the need for leads."

Pacemaker batteries are one of the weak links in the technology, which uses mild electrical pulses to help regulate heartbeats. As heart failure patients live longer and get the implants earlier, the likelihood increases that patients will outlive the batteries in their implants, requiring risky an invasive revision surgery to replace a dead pacemaker.

Zurbuchen and his team aren’t the only ones looking at ways to use the body’s motion to replace batteries. Engineers at the University of Michigan are working on similar technology, hoping to harvest the energy of a beating heart.

"Many of the patients are children who live with pacemakers for many years," lead author M. Amin Karami said in an American Heart Assn. press release tied to the organization’s 2012 conference. "You can imagine how many operations they are spared if this new technology is implemented."

At the time the team had only reached bench-testing, using a "shaker" to reproduce a heartbeat. The team hasn’t issued a public update on the project since then.