[sgtnoodle]

As an embedded engineer with about 12 years of battery life, I've thought about this topic a fair amount. It would be neat to somehow integrate a super capacitor capable of powering the device for a day or two, and an inductive charger able to top it off in just a few seconds. This could ideally be done via a standard smart phone inductive charger. Then, reduce the size of the primary cell to cover just a couple years as a backup. For a younger person looking at many decades of pacemaker operation, that could save them from a number of surgeries, as relatively minor as they are.