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Medtronic plc
Medical-device giant; absorbed Covidien — maker of Polysorb braided absorbable sutures and surgical products.
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Cardiovascular
38%Neuroscience
28%Medical Surgical
22%Diabetes Technologies
12%
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Did you know2024
Medtronic's Percept PC deep brain stimulation system (DBS) — which implants a pulsed electrical stimulator in the brain to treat Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, and OCD — is the same hardware platform that records real-time neural brain signals as biomarkers for "adaptive" stimulation. The embedded neural signal processing in a Parkinson's DBS device is functionally identical to the signal acquisition hardware in academic brain-computer interface (BCI) research systems. When Elon Musk's Neuralink or Synchron announces progress on "reading neural signals" for paralysis patients, they are working in the same technological territory as Medtronic's existing commercial Percept DBS implants, which already record local field potentials from the subthalamic nucleus of Parkinson's patients and adjust stimulation in response — making Medtronic's 50,000-patient DBS installed base arguably the world's largest deployed neural interface program, operating under a different marketing name.
Medtronic plc ↗Origin2024
Medtronic was founded in 1949 in a garage in Minneapolis by Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie as a medical equipment repair shop — fixing broken hospital equipment. Bakken, an electrical engineering student at the University of Minnesota, was inspired to build a wearable cardiac pacemaker after reading a Popular Electronics article about a transistorized metronome circuit in 1956. He built the world's first wearable transistorized pacemaker in his garage in two weeks. The prototype was tried on a child with a heart condition, and it worked. Bakken's two-week garage build became the founding product of what is now the world's largest medical device company. Minneapolis became the "Medical Alley" — the global hub of medical device innovation — largely because one repair technician read a popular magazine and decided to build a pacemaker instead of just fixing equipment.
Medtronic plc ↗