HeartSine Brand Guidelines: Belfast’s samaritan AED Maker, Now Part of Stryker

An engineer from the Royal Victoria Hospital.

HeartSine is a maker of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Its story starts with an engineer. The Irish News reported in September 2015 that the company was founded in 1997 by Professor John Anderson, who had worked with the cardiologist Frank Pantridge in Belfast in the 1960s and 1970s and was part of the team that developed what the paper called a pioneering mobile coronary care unit. In 2020 the same paper described Anderson as a co-founder and as head of bioengineering at the Royal Victoria Hospital when that unit was launched.

The company’s timeline dates that mobile unit to 1966, under the medical direction of Pantridge and Dr Geddes, and calls the model “the Belfast Experience.” It says the early apparatus weighed about 110 pounds, that the 1967 battery-operated defibrillator weighed 44, and that the Pantridge Portable 15 of 1971 weighed 15 pounds. It also says Anderson filed one of the first patents for the automatic recognition of ventricular fibrillation in 1980 and led work on Northern Ireland’s first AED in 1981.

The company’s own timeline tells the longer version. It says Anderson set up the hospital’s biomedical engineering group in the 1960s, worked with the American Optical company on a battery-powered portable defibrillator in 1967, and later led work on the Pantridge Portable 15 and on CORA, a combined ECG display and tape recorder for ambulances. It dates HeartSine’s launch to 1998, when, it says, Anderson brought together a group of innovators and investors; the newspaper gives 1997.

The Irish News put the Belfast workforce at 115, in a design and manufacturing facility, in 2015, and at more than 200 in 2020, when it said the company was based next to Belfast City Airport.

samaritan, Pad-Pak and the SAM line.

HeartSine’s products carry the samaritan name, written in lower case. The company’s timeline dates the first samaritan AED to 2001 and the samaritan PAD, for public-access defibrillation, to 2004, a device it describes as having just two buttons, on/off and shock. It lists the PAD 300P of 2006, its first model for both adults and children; the PDU 400 of 2008, a single-use unit; and the PAD 500P of 2010, with a CPR Advisor that it says is not sold in the United States.

The current range is the SAM 350P, launched in 2013, the SAM 360P, which the company calls its first fully automatic model, from 2014, and the SAM 450P of 2015, with a CPR Rate Advisor. Central to the design is the Pad-Pak, a single cartridge that combines the electrode pads and the battery, so that, in the company’s words, there are “two parts, one expiration date.” The 2018 HeartSine Gateway adds Wi-Fi so that a fleet of devices can report its status; the Irish News reported in 2020 that the Gateway was rolled out in 2019, alongside a series of apps. The timeline also says the Pad-Pak’s shelf life was doubled to four years in 2011, that the SAM 450P was launched in Japan in 2019, and that Japan’s regulator, the PMDA, approved the SAM 360P in 2021.

The company states that the US Food and Drug Administration granted premarket approval to the SAM 350P, 360P and 450P in 2017, and that the SAM 350P was approved for sale without a prescription in 2022. In 2015 the Irish News reported that HeartSine made between 25,000 and 30,000 units a year and sold most of its output abroad, to customers including BP, American Airlines and the Singapore military.

The company has also argued in public for more devices. In the same 2015 report, its chief executive, Declan O’Mahoney, was quoted as having called for legislation in Northern Ireland to make portable defibrillators available in government and public buildings, arguing that they should be treated like fire extinguishers.

Monitors, defibrillators and the people who use them.

Makers of patient monitors and resuscitation equipment present themselves through settings more than through objects. The familiar picture is the intensive-care bedside: a monitor beside the bed, its screen filled with coloured waveforms and numbers, wired to the patient and to a central station down the corridor. The same companies also show their equipment in operating theatres, emergency departments and the backs of ambulances.

Outside the hospital, the images change. Automated external defibrillators appear in wall-mounted cabinets in railway stations, airports, offices and sports halls, often in a brightly coloured case marked with a heart symbol. Paramedics are shown kneeling with a portable monitor-defibrillator, and training courses use mannequins on the floor of a classroom, where people practise chest compressions and placing pads.

Much of the visual language comes from the signals themselves. The ECG strip, with its grid of pink or green squares and a running trace, is the oldest of these images, and many makers began with recorders that drew such traces on paper long before screens took over. Waveforms, grids and the outline of a heart recur in catalogues, brochures and trade-fair stands.

Those trade fairs are where the sector meets its buyers. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and Arab Health in the Gulf are among the international shows where makers set out their monitors, defibrillators and software side by side. This guide looks at how individual makers began, who owns them now and what they say about where their products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

From Physio-Control to Stryker.

HeartSine was sold in September 2015 to Physio-Control, the Redmond, Washington, maker of LIFEPAK defibrillators, the Irish News reported; the newspaper said the combination created a major provider of AEDs. Within months its new parent changed hands too. In February 2016 Stryker agreed to buy Physio-Control, which had been part of Medtronic from 1998, was spun off in 2006 and was bought by a Bain Capital unit in 2011, the paper reported. By 2020 it described HeartSine as part of Stryker since 2016.

The Belfast company keeps its own name and maker’s role. The HeartSine website says its AEDs and trainers are developed and manufactured by HeartSine Technologies, Ltd., Belfast, “a part of Stryker,” and distributed globally by Stryker. It also lists the marks owned by Stryker, among them HeartSine, samaritan, CPR Advisor and Saver EVO, and states that “the yellow and black color scheme is a registered trademark of Stryker Corporation”. The website and its timeline are offered in several languages, and the company says its AEDs were available in 67 countries by 2019.

For a design guide, HeartSine shows how a small device maker can make colour do the work of a logo, with a yellow-and-black scheme its owner has registered as a trademark. Compare Physio-Control, which bought it in 2015, and Stryker, its owner today. For this guide we use a charcoal, a near-black, a warm yellow and a pale butter with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HeartSine’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.