Pacemaker Manufacturing: From 1960 Implants to ABB Cobots

Pacemaker manufacturing has to hit a tough target: a sealed titanium case, or a leadless capsule small enough to sit inside the heart, that must keep working for years without a single leak. In September 2026 Abbott won US approval for its smaller Aveir VR Mini, which shows how far the shrinking has gone. This post follows the first pacemakers of 1958 to 1960, the move to tiny leadless devices, and the kind of precise handling and welding the work needs. It also looks at where ABB robots such as the YuMi and the IRB 1300 could fit.

A CPI Microlith pacemaker with its lead, a titanium can that must be sealed against leaks. Photo: Brian Adducci / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From a shoe polish tin to the first Buffalo implants

The first fully implanted pacemaker went into a patient in Sweden. In October 1958 surgeon Ake Senning at the Karolinska hospital implanted a device built by the engineer Rune Elmqvist in the patient Arne Larsson. One account says the first unit failed within hours, and Larsson went on to receive 26 pacemakers over his life and lived to 86. Elmqvist is said to have cast the first units in the tin of a shoe polish can. This was bench work, one device at a time, by hand, and sources still disagree on which team deserves to be called first. The Swedish unit was the first fully implanted pacemaker in a human, while the Buffalo design is the one that was commercialized and widely used.

A Medtronic pacemaker held in both hands in 1961. Photo: Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In the United States the story started with an accident. Wilson Greatbatch was building a heart sound recorder when he made a pulsing circuit by mistake. On 7 May 1958 he took a pacemaker built with two transistors to William Chardack, chief of surgery at the Buffalo Veterans hospital, and they tested it on a dog. The first human implant followed in 1960. Greatbatch's design used a mercury-zinc battery, an advance on the Swedish model, and Medtronic's Earl Bakken began to produce this new style of device.

Medtronic founder Earl Bakken, who built the first wearable battery powered pacemaker in 1957, photographed in 2007. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri and Paul Schmokel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Production stayed manual for decades, but the product shrank. Cases moved to welded titanium, batteries improved, and later lithium cells, which Greatbatch also worked on, gave the devices longer lives. A Medtronic Micro-Minix from 1993 sits in the Science Museum in London, and it shows how compact the devices had become by then. Each step down in size made assembly harder, and manual skill became the limit, because the same parts, a battery, a circuit and a header, had to fit in a smaller space with less room for a human hand.

A Medtronic Micro-Minix pacemaker from 1993 on show at the Science Museum, London. Photo: The wub / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Leadless devices and the robots near them

The latest milestone is a smaller leadless pacemaker. On 15 September 2026 Abbott announced FDA approval of the Aveir VR Mini, a ventricular device that is 32.5 mm long, down from 38.0 mm on the existing Aveir VR. It pairs with Abbott's Aveir AR2 atrial device in a dual chamber system that talks implant to implant. One report notes that Medtronic's Micra measures 25.9 mm, so the size race continues. Abbott does not publish how it builds these capsules, so what follows is general.

A chest X-ray showing a dual chamber leadless pacemaker inside the heart. Photo: Hellerhoff / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where could ABB fit? No source says ABB robots build pacemakers, so treat this as a possibility. ABB's single arm YuMi IRB 14050 has been used on a GE Healthcare prototype line in Helsinki, and the IRB 1300 comes in a Clean Room version for work that has to stay free of particles. Both suit small parts. A leadless capsule holds a battery, electronics and a fixation mechanism in a tiny body, and each part must be placed and checked without a scratch.

A single arm YuMi IRB 14050 in its cell on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki. Photo: ABB

The sealing step is where precision matters most. Pacemaker cases are usually titanium shells welded together, and titanium picks up oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen when hot, so welding is done in a dry argon atmosphere. Suppliers describe glovebox laser welders, and helium is often added so that leaks can be detected. Feedthroughs, the sealed wires that pass through the case, are laser welded to a titanium ferrule. One patent notes that bending lead wires by hand is tedious in compact devices, a task a robot could take over. Teams plan such cells in RobotStudio first.

A St Jude Medical pacemaker with its lead beside a ruler for scale. Photo: Steven Fruitsmaak / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

What comes next for pacemaker robots

For patients, the trend is toward smaller devices with longer lives and fewer complications, and more dual chamber leadless systems. The Aveir VR Mini's shorter body gives doctors more choices of placement in the right ventricle. For factories, that means tighter tolerances, new materials and more variants, which suits flexible robot cells better than fixed machines that have to be rebuilt for every new model. A cell that can be reprogrammed and re-simulated for a new capsule length is easier to justify than a custom machine that serves one design for a few years.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot at a test station with moulded parts. Photo: ABB

Cost and validation are the open problems. A medical device line has to be proven before it makes a single sellable unit, and every change to a robot program or gripper can trigger fresh testing. That favours robots with repeatable motion and traceable programs, and it favours suppliers who have already shown their arms in healthcare. Our post on ABB robots in medical device assembly covers what that work looks like.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm for fast small part work. Photo: ABB

Skills and safety come next. Operators must understand cleanroom rules, and engineers need to know both welding and motion control, which is a rare mix. Robots that work next to people need speed limits and safe zones, and ABB's SafeMove is one tool for setting them. Easy programming tools such as Wizard also help technicians who are not robot specialists adjust a cell themselves. For anyone curious what these arms can do beyond medicine, our overview of ABB robot use cases is a good place to begin.

An Osypka Pace 500 D external pacing unit, one of the cardiac devices hospitals rely on. Photo: Rawan Yasin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com