Masimo Corporation | Diversity Employer

The History of Masimo SET® Pulse Oximetry

Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI) is a global medical technology company that develops and manufactures innovative noninvasive patient monitoring technologies, medical devices, and a wide array of sensors. We believe that Masimo SET® helps clinicians monitor in excess of approximately 100 million patients in healthcare settings around the world,1 and is the pulse oximeter technology used by 17 of the top 20 hospitals on the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll for the 2016-2017 year.2

Joe Kiani founded Masimo in 1989 as a private "garage start-up" company because he was convinced that the use of adaptive signal processing in the measurement of physiological parameters could solve the problems of low perfusion and motion, which had long plagued in-vivo monitoring and especially pulse oximetry, the measurement of the oxygen saturation of arterial blood. His solution, Masimo SET® Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion™ pulse oximetry, was shown in a study comparing three pulse oximetry technologies to demonstrate the highest sensitivity and specificity in identifying desaturation events during conditions of motion and low perfusion.3

Masimo Today

Today, Masimo is publicly traded and employs over 4,000 people worldwide, with annual revenues of approximately $700 million.  Licensing agreements allow Masimo technology to work inside monitoring devices from a host of manufacturers, including Philips, Atom, Datascope, GE Medical, Medtronic, Spacelabs, and Zoll. Throughout its more than 25-year journey, Masimo’s mission – to improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care by taking noninvasive monitoring to new sites and applications – has remained strong.