At a summit between one of Russia’s leading inventors and the country’s top cardiologist, a curious parallel emerged.
Microelectronics specialist Martyn Nunuparov wanted to produce a pacemaker that requires no battery, but he had little knowledge about the intricacies of a living heart muscle.
Veteran surgeon Leo Bockeria, on the other hand, understood perfectly what the heart was capable of, but had trouble believing Nunuparov’s kinetic energy-harnessing device could function reliably.
An x-ray of a patient with a classic battery-powered pacemaker
In a recent interview with sk.ru, Nunuparov, a resident of Skolkovo’s energy cluster, shared his recollections of that pivotal autumn meeting at Bockeria’s office in Moscow.
“He asked me, ‘do you really believe it’s possible to do this?’ I said, ‘I think so, I even know several ways it can be done, but I haven’t the foggiest idea how the heart really works, how to harvest its energy and so on,’” Nunuparov recalled.
Then the gravity of the proposed invention hit home, and for Nunuparov, whose own heart is in frontier research rather than consumer gadgets, there was no way back.
“I became really captivated by it: This is a global level we’re talking about, and a solution to this problem would be massively in demand,” added Nunuparov, who seeks funds to develop a prototype to woo investors.
The potentially revolutionary idea of a pacemaker without a power source was conceived after Nunuparov crossed paths with Bockeria’s daughter Olga, who followed her father into cardiovascular surgery, at the Open Innovations Forum in Moscow last October.
As it happened, Olga Bockeria’s team had developed a battery-powered epicardial pacemaker that was one of 14 winning innovations at the forum to receive financing. Nunuparov was also among the winners - albeit for a different gadget – and struck up a working relationship with Olga Bockeria to develop the kinetic energy version of the pacemaker.
But as the 60-year-old delved deeper into the project, its difficulty started to hit home – and right at a time when money was getting tight.
“This is an area I really want to develop, but when we started to speak to surgeons about how a foreign object behaves inside an organism, then I really started to understand how complex a task this is,” Nunuparov said.
“Not just for me as a physicist-engineer in figuring out how to harvest the energy, but in how to build a device that would survive inside an organism so that the organism doesn’t reject it.”
Olga Bockeria, who serves as the deputy head of the Bakulev Scientific Center for Cardiovascular Surgery, comforted the inventor.
“When you gather energy from the heart, and I really do harness it to turn into electricity for the pacemaker, then the heart can tire from that extra workload. But Olga Bockeria said: There’s no problem here, the heart won’t tire, it will withstand it.”
But encouragement won’t pay the bills, and Nunuparov fidgets as he is asked how he plans to move towards his prototype.
“We simply need the money to conduct this work,” he says.
The pacemaker is the most exciting application of Energy Harvesting technology that Nunuparov has been working on for the better part of 15 years.
He could fill a suitcase with the inventions he has produced over that time – and, it turns out, has. Clicking open the lid of the case, Nunuparov reveal a trove of electronic locks, wireless switches, light bulbs, keycards, dongles, thermometers, glucometers and battery-testers, some of which are already on the market.
Examining object after object, it becomes difficult to understand how Nunuparov is not already a household name.
Dr. Nunuparov at Skolkovo Technopark Offfice Center.
Boiling it down to its essence, Nunuparov’s main technology converts organic movement into electrical current. The technology has existed for decades – visible to most in the humble cigarette lighter – but Nunuparov says he can squeeze far more power out of the same process: He can get you 20 seconds of electronic calculator use from the power generated by just one click of the lighter; turn on a light 300 meters away with a piezo-powered switch; or secure an electronic safe with no power source.
Forced into inventing in the early 2000s, when the state financing dried up for his laboratory at the prestigious Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nunuparov’s initial foray was into electronic locks and keycards that secure hotel rooms.
To this day, hotel locks the world over require a constant power source in the form of a battery or connection to the mains, yet Nunuparov’s locks don’t need any: The process of inserting the card into the slot generates enough electricity to identify the holder and, if positive, open the lock.
He says he was close to a deal with a major Canadian firm but it fell through due to the owner selling up his assets.
Next were lights and electrical appliances: a click switch that activates lights or any gadget within radio signal range.
Then came the measuring devices – two thermometers and a glucometer.
A glucometer for diabetics also uses the audio jack of the smartphone and collates results over time, feeding them into a database that’s accessible remotely to doctors.His first thermometer gave a simple digital readout with the click of a button. A new device, developed years later, plugs into smartphones through the audio socket.
The glucometer plugged into a smartphone
The phone displays the temperature on-screen and records data over time for medical analysis. Nunuparov gave a demonstration, popping a node under his tongue and waiting a few seconds for the correct temperature to appear. The Russian chain store Expedition sells the invention, marketed as a fun and easy way to take a child’s temperature – as well as for women “to make sure they won’t get pregnant,” as Nunuparov says - for 1,990 rubles.
Nunuparov’s latest ideas elaborate on the audio jack-smartphone technology. He came close to supplying McDonalds with dongles for their Happy Meals before the intermediary marketer pulled out of talks in protest a Nunuparov’s reluctance to share the secrets of the invention.
Kids, the idea went, would get a plastic toy in the Happy Meal that could be plugged into a smartphone via a jack. The toy could contain anything from a game to a message that the owner has won a free hamburger, for example.
“They needed something that cost under a dollar apiece. I proved that I could produce them for 20 cents each,” Nunuparov said.
Had Nunuparov had the resources for a lawyer who would legally protect his ideas in the negotiations phase, things might have advanced.
As it is, the inventions keep coming. Another dongle, named QJackPro, slides onto your key-ring as the holder of all your smartphone passwords. Users needing to access a banking app, for example, would skip the password stage and simply plug the key into the audio socket. But dealing with Russia’s national banks requires preliminary clearance from the security agencies, which threatens to torpedo the idea despite favorable reviews from five major banks.
“They all say, ‘That’s class! Just give us an FSB license first,’” Nunuparov said, adding he’s “very far” from attaining such a thing. “They could worry that I’ll rob all the banks with this gadget.”
Other areas in which Nunuparov is dabbling include smart-home technology that allows users to activate locks, lights and home appliances remotely via their smartphone. He claims to have had positive feedback from initial tests on an oligarch’s Moscow mansion.
It is tempting to think all that separates Nunuparov from the fortunes of the consumer market is a lucky break: that daring investor or that game-changing invention. That may still be ahead.
Nevertheless, in conversation with the bespectacled thinker, it quickly becomes clear that this is a scientist first, and a businessman second. He acknowledges that his forays into consumerism are to fund the more serious lab work.
“We simply need a source of funding,” he says. “I want to do science and physics. But I need to earn money to pay for it all - the theoretical physics.”
Meanwhile, one area of cooperation he does not plan dropping anytime soon is with Skolkovo.
“I tell all the companies that they should go to Skolkovo because it’s an important support mechanism. You can really get money, support and PR,” he said, before referring to a Skolkovo competition that encourages breakthroughs in computer technology.
"At More than Moore I met amazing scientists about whom nobody knows a thing.”
Perhaps, among those scientists, the next Nunuparov will emerge.