Rune Elmqvist (1 December 1906 – 15 December 1996) was a Swedish physician turned engineer who developed the first implantable pacemaker in 1958, working under the direction of Åke Senning, senior physician and cardiac surgeon at the Karolinska University Hospital in Solna, Sweden.

In 1948, he developed the first inkjet ECG printer[1] which he called the mingograph while working at Elema-Schönander.

The pacemaker was based on a single transistor and gave 2V pulses at intervals of 1.5 milliseconds to produce 70 heartbeats per minute.

The earliest pacemaker had been moulded with Araldite epoxy which was biocompatible inside a Kiwi shoe-polish container.

[2] Larsson needed nearly 30 pacemakers during his lifetime and he lived until 2001, outliving both Elmquist and his surgeon Dr Senning who died in 2000.