Nihon Kohden Brand Guidelines: Yoshio Ogino’s 1951 Tokyo EEG Maker and the Ear Oximeter

Twelve employees, a hearing aid and an EEG.

Nihon Kohden was founded in Tokyo on 7 August 1951 by Dr Yoshio Ogino, the company says, with twelve employees and the aim of joining medicine and engineering. Its stated founding vision was “Fighting Disease With Electronics,” and its brand pages still describe the field it set out to serve as “ME,” short for medical electronics or medical engineering. The Japanese name, Nihon Kōden Kōgyō, is usually shortened in English to Nihon Kohden.

The first income did not come from medical instruments at all. According to the company’s own history, the young firm took over the production and marketing of Trio hearing aids from Trio Electric Laboratories as its only source of revenue, and hearing-aid sales spread through retail outlets across Japan after the product received a ministry award in 1952. Four months after the founding, it says, it completed the ME-1D, an eight-channel ink-writing electroencephalograph that it describes as an early model to run entirely on mains power. A single-channel electrocardiograph, the MC-1B, and a photo-electric kymograph followed in the same year.

The 1950s brought a run of instruments that the company lists as firsts for Japan: a ballistocardiograph, an electromagnetic blood flowmeter, an EEG analyser and oscilloscopes for laboratory work. In 1954, it says, Ogino travelled to an ophthalmology congress in the United States to present the company’s ophthalmodynamometer, its first product shown in America, and in 1956 he became the company’s president.

Growth was quick. In 1961 Nihon Kohden was listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which it describes as the first medical-electronics company to be listed there, and around the same time it built its first factory at Tomioka in Gunma prefecture. The company says that by its fifteenth anniversary in 1966 it had more than thirty sales branches around Japan.

Defibrillators, monitors and a pulse of light.

Resuscitation and monitoring came in the 1960s. The company dates its first battery-powered defibrillators, which it calls Japan’s first, to the mid-1960s, and says the defibrillator then became one of its main products at home and for export. In 1967 it installed the ICU-80, which it describes as Japan’s first intensive-care monitor, at the Tohoku University School of Medicine. Bedside and central monitors have since carried the Life Scope name, from the Life Scope 10 heart monitor of 1982 to the Life Scope 14 bedside monitor of 1992.

One episode in the company’s research history is pulse oximetry, the method of reading blood oxygen through the skin with light. English Wikipedia says a company researcher, Takuo Aoyagi, invented and patented its basic principles in 1972 and that the OLV-5100 followed two years later; the company’s own history dates Aoyagi’s principle to 1974 and the launch of the OLV-5100 ear oximeter to 1975. Both agree that the device came from Nihon Kohden’s laboratories.

Electroencephalographs remained the company’s home ground. Its history lists a compact EEG in 1970, a microprocessor-controlled EEG in 1979 and, under the Neurofax name, a Windows-based digital EEG in 1994, and its business pages say it holds a high global share of the EEG market. Alongside these it makes electrocardiographs under the Cardiofax name, evoked-potential and EMG systems, haematology analysers and clinical information software. In 2019, it says, it launched the first ventilator of its own design, after years of importing ventilators from other makers.

Expansion abroad began with Nihon Kohden America in 1979, followed by an office in Amsterdam in 1981, a German company at Bad Homburg in 1983 and a European company in London in 1989. In 1982 the shares moved to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. A Shanghai manufacturing company for electrocardiographs followed in 1991 and a Singapore subsidiary in 1996.

Bedside, ambulance and wall cabinet.

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.

A Tokyo listing, a Gunma factory and an AED maker in Connecticut.

In the resuscitation market Nihon Kohden grew by purchase as well as by its own designs. On 13 November 2012 the AED maker Defibtech, of Guilford, Connecticut, announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Nihon Kohden and would continue to run independently as a wholly owned subsidiary of Resuscitation Solution Inc., a US subsidiary of the Tokyo company, Occupational Health & Safety reported the next day. Defibtech is still listed among Nihon Kohden’s US subsidiaries, alongside companies in neurology, digital health and research.

On manufacturing, the company makes plain claims of its own. Its quality pages say it handles every stage of making its main units and sensors in house, from planning to production, and that it makes most of its printed circuit boards itself. It calls the Tomioka Production Center MIRAI in Gunma its “mother factory,” and its worldwide list includes a manufacturing company in Shanghai and a subsidiary near Florence. It also says it was Japan’s first manufacturer of domestically produced AEDs and that its equipment is exported to more than 120 countries and regions.

Design is part of the company’s public face. Its design philosophy is headed “Heartfelt Design,” and it lists Japan’s Good Design Award for the compact AED-M100 defibrillator in 2021, the BreathCue neonatal resuscitation monitor in 2022 and AsisTIVA, software for controlling anaesthetic syringe pumps, in 2023. It says its CerebAir EEG headset received a Red Dot design award in 2018.

Nihon Kohden Corporation is today listed on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, with its head office in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and a regional company in Germany for Europe and another in California for North America. Its president and chief executive is Hirokazu Ogino; the company’s history records that Kazuo Ogino became president in 1989, when Yoshio Ogino moved to the role of chairman.

For a design guide, Nihon Kohden shows how a maker can carry one founding idea, electronics in the service of medicine, from a hearing aid to bedside monitors. Compare ZOLL, another resuscitation name owned from Tokyo, and Philips, whose healthcare arm also makes monitors. For this guide we use a deep teal, a night ink and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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