Apple’s hiring spree of biosensor experts continues with the latest revelation pointing to another high-profile executive hire.
According to the newest scoop by NetworkWorld, the former chief technology officer of non-invasive patient monitoring company Cercacor, Marcelo Lamego, has joined Apple’s iWatch team.
Apple has been hiring some of the world’s top experts in sleep research, medical devices and biosensing, fueling speculation that its rumored wearable device will focus on health and fitness tracking…
NetworkWorld spotted an interesting employee change on Lamego’s public LinkedIn profile, indicating he began working at Apple this January in R&D capacity.
Lamego invented more than 70 patent applications/patents related to “optimization and signal processing, devices, sensors and patient monitoring technologies,” according to his profile on the popular social network for people in professional occupations.
As Cercacor’s chief technical officer, Lamego helped develop its Pronto-7 non-invasive medical device capable of measuring a patient’s oxygen saturation and hemoglobin levels, along with pulse rates.
Prior to joining Cercacor, Lamego worked as a Research Scientist at Masimo, which now sells the Pronto-7 device. Masimo was spun off of Cercacor in the late 1990s.
While at Masimo, Lamego was in charge of the development of the company’s Rainbow Technology, a non-invasive monitoring platform which can assess multiple blood constituents and physiologic parameters that previously required invasive or complicated procedures.
It recently came to light that Apple last summer hired Michael O’Reilly, Masimo’s former Chief Medical Officer and Executive VP for Medical Affairs whose current role at Apple does not “solely focus on the iWatch project,” according to 9to5Mac.
NetworkWorld adds this:
Another example of a Masimo product which utilizes the Rainbow Technology platform comes in the form of a neck patch that continuously measures a patient’s respiration rate and works to alert physicians “to the first sign of an abnormal or compromised breathing pattern.”
Other notable hires NetworkWorld spotted:
- Vital Connect’s Algorithms Architect Nima Ferdosi joined Apple in November
- Biomedical Engineer Alexander Chan left Vital Connect in January 2014 to join a “Technology Company” in the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds a PhD in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Heath Sciences and Technology.
- Stephen Waydo, Problem Solver at Bay Area Technology Company, is another likely Apple hire. He spent nearly five years at C8 Medisensors developing non-invasive medical products to measure blood glucose. Waydo last month retweeted tweets from both Phil Schiller and Tim Cook regarding the Mac’s 30th birthday.
- Former Acuvein engineer Yuming Liu is now Analog Engineer at Apple
And here’s the sophisticated Star Trek-like Acuvein device Liu helped develop.
A quick look at Apple’s recent iWatch-related hires indicates that the team size has grown to 200 hardware and software engineers, double the initial 100 people on the iWatch team as reported by Bloomberg a year ago.
According to Apple’s boss Tim Cook, wearable technologies are “ripe for exploration” as the whole sensor field “is going to explode”. While it’s currently “a little all over the place”, the CEO said that “with the arc of time, it will become clearer”.