​​How watchmakers, nail technicians, and video game developers are shaping health tech 

A luxury Swiss watch has a lot in common with a cardiac pacemaker. 

Just ask Benjamin Visconti and Dylan Lamas, two former watchmakers who now apply their precision and craftsmanship to building medical devices, including the world’s smallest pacemaker. 

Both Swiss watches — considered by many to be the gold standards of horology for their craftsmanship, technological innovation, and high standards — and pacemakers are marvels of precision engineering that keep perfect time; one on the wrist and the other in the chest. 

These employees’ unexpected leap, from a watchmaker’s bench to the manufacturing frontlines at Medtronic, is not a departure from the rigor and prestige pursued in making a luxury watch, but a continuation of it.   

“The savoir faire and quality standards of the watchmaking industry is something that benefits the medical device industry,” said Lamas, who works now as a project management specialist at a site in Switzerland where pacemakers are assembled.  

Lamas’ and Visconti’s careers show that people don’t need to start off in healthcare to bring health tech to patients.

Former watchmakers, nail technicians, and video game engineers are bringing technical expertise from unexpected industries into medical technology.

What a former nail technician learned about manufacturing quality

Na Yary spent a decade sitting at a nail technician’s desk. She was a perfectionist — every stroke of paint had to be perfect, no flower petal or rhinestone could be awry.

“It’s about the client first,” Yary said. “As a nail technician, you always want to do your best so the client can feel happy. I want someone to walk out of the nail salon smiling.”

When a role opened as a trainer on a Medtronic manufacturing line, Yary recognized an opportunity to apply her steady hands and knack for precision in a new way: training others on how to build the Sphere-9™ catheter used with the Affera™ mapping and ablation system.

“It’s going into the human body,” she said of the catheters she trains others to build. “It could be one of your family members treated with it. You’re not just there to get your eight-hour day done. No. You have to do it with passion, you have to do it with quality.”

Yary is now a manufacturing team lead at a Medtronic facility in Massachusetts. She encouraged others to recognize their strengths and how they could be applied to a new career.

How video game developers are transforming surgical training

A former video game engineer, Paul Rosson now works in surgical training at Medtronic, where he creates virtual reality simulations to train surgeons on how to use Hugo™, a robotic-assisted surgical system.

The London-based engineer said his background in game development can make serious training in the healthcare technology industry more intuitive and engaging.

He said of his team within the Studio Center of Excellence of Digital Technologies at Medtronic, many of whom come from backgrounds in the entertainment industry, that “we went from creating fantasy worlds to operating rooms, but the core skills are the same.”  

The team’s skills in building worlds, creating realistic anatomy, and thinking visually mark a shift in how gaming technology — and even game-controller-like interactions — are moving beyond the entertainment industry.

“The ‘serious’ games are everywhere, which is a term for when you’re creating for experiences outside of entertainment, such as aviation or healthcare,” Rosson said. “If you look at the design of some surgical robots, you can tell they were using gaming controllers when prototyping.”

Mark Stacey is an engineer on Rosson’s team. He worked on high-profile video games before moving to Medtronic and said his skills are now applied to higher-stakes scenarios.

“Rather than having a game designer tell me how to make a character’s controls feel better when he’s casting a spell, I have a medical officer and a designer telling me how the robot should react when you undock it from a port,” he said of his work building virtual reality simulations for Hugo™ and the Stealth AxiS™ robotic system.

Why nontraditional careers can improve healthcare innovation

Benjamin, the former watchmaker in Switzerland who works now as a Medtronic engineering leader where pacemakers and defibrillators are built, said he pursues craftsmanship in service of a different purpose now: patients.

“In watchmaking, quality is for the customer,” he said of an industry that few leave. “Here, we need 100% quality for the patient. Quality comes first.”

Whether assembling a luxury watch, designing a virtual world, or perfecting a set of nails, the skills that define precision and quality can have unexpected applications. Finding the skills and capabilities to move healthcare forward can mean looking beyond traditional career paths. Medtronic employees from diverse backgrounds are proving that innovation in healthcare doesn't always begin in a laboratory. Sometimes it starts in places no one expects.

Published Oct. 1, 2026