Nonin Brand Guidelines: The Minnesota Maker Named for “Noninvasive” Since 1986

Short for noninvasive.

Nonin Medical, Inc. takes its name from a description of its method: the company says “Nonin” is short for “noninvasive.” It makes devices that measure blood oxygen and related readings from outside the body, chiefly pulse oximeters — the clips that shine light through a fingertip — along with regional oximeters, capnographs, sensors and software.

The company says it was founded in 1986 by the physicist Phil Isaacson and a team of three engineers, with the goal of making noninvasive measuring devices more reliable and more affordable. Its leadership page adds that Isaacson began the venture in 1985 and that the company was incorporated in 1986; a 2021 press release describes him as a co-founder. The earliest record in the United States Food and Drug Administration’s 510(k) database bears out the date: Nonin Medical received a clearance for its Model 8604 oxygen and pulse monitor in June 1986, with an address in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Later filings list Minneapolis and, from 1994, Plymouth, the western suburb where the company is still based. Its press releases carry a Minneapolis dateline.

Isaacson remains executive chairman and chief technology officer, according to the company, which says he is named as an inventor on 25 patents. In November 2025 Nonin announced that its board had appointed Todd Austin as chief executive; he had previously led MGC Diagnostics, which Nonin described as “a subsidiary of CAIRE Inc. and Niterra.” The company says it marked its 40th anniversary in 2026.

Nonin says its products reach partners and customers in more than 125 countries, served from Minnesota and from a service centre in Amsterdam, and that hundreds of other medical device makers use its technology. Its OEM range — modules and sensors built into other companies’ equipment — is a large part of that reach, and the company says it released its first low-power oximeter for OEM partners in 1997.

From hand-held to fingertip.

The FDA database traces the shrinking of the product. Nonin received clearance for the Model 8500 hand-held pulse oximeter in February 1990, and for a “miniaturized finger clip pulse oximeter” in December 1994. The company dates its first portable hand-held oximeter to 1990 and its first fingertip oximeter to 1995, and describes both as world firsts — claims that are the company’s own.

An independent account supports the fingertip story. In April 2020, as demand for home pulse oximeters rose early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis described Nonin as the “Plymouth-based firm that invented the fingertip pulse oximeter more than 20 years ago,” and quoted Isaacson saying that existing customers were trying to buy ten times more than before: “We can’t keep up.”

The fingertip line carries the name Onyx: an FDA filing of 2000 modifies the Onyx model 9500, and the Onyx II 9550 was cleared in 2005. Nonin’s current range is grouped by form — fingertip, wrist-worn, handheld and tabletop — with names such as WristOx, PalmSAT, Avant and SenSmart, the last a system for regional oximetry, a field in which the FDA database first lists a Nonin device in 2009. In 2020 the company introduced the CO-Pilot, a handheld device for emergency crews that it says reads oxygen saturation, pulse rate, carboxyhaemoglobin and methaemoglobin; Nonin says it won an innovation award from EMS World that year.

Its most recent consumer product is the TruO2 OTC, an over-the-counter fingertip oximeter. The FDA database shows clearance of the Nonin OTC Pulse Oximeter Model 3250 in November 2024; Nonin says that device is the TruO2.

Nonin has also tied its devices to wider data systems. It says it was a founding member of the Continua health-device alliance in 2008, received a Bluetooth SIG “Best of CES” award in 2009, and in 2024 partnered with the sleep-testing firm EnsoData on home sleep tests. Its Nonin Health platform, launched in 2025, handles home overnight oximetry testing, according to the company.

Design and documentation.

Respiratory care and patient monitoring sit in two places at once: the hospital ward and the patient’s home. Companies in this field make ventilators, CPAP and bi-level machines, oxygen concentrators, pulse oximeters and bedside monitors, and the way they present themselves usually follows the device to wherever it is used — a ventilator beside an intensive care bed, a small machine on a bedside table at home, a clip on a fingertip.

Their pictures tend to fall into a few familiar scenes. In hospital settings, clinicians stand at monitors with waveform screens showing pressure, flow or oxygen saturation; at home, patients sleep with a mask on or carry a portable concentrator through an ordinary day. Patient stories, often tied to a named model, sit alongside product pages written for respiratory therapists, doctors and home-care providers.

The field also meets in public at medical congresses and trade fairs. The European Respiratory Society congress, the American Thoracic Society conference and the Medica fair in Düsseldorf are among the gatherings where respiratory and monitoring products are shown to clinicians and buyers, and company news is often timed around them.

The companies in this guide differ widely in age, size and ownership — family firms, units of larger groups and makers that have changed hands several times. Each section sets out what can be checked about one brand: who founded it, who owns it now, what it makes and what it says about itself, with the company’s own claims marked as its own. Where sources disagree on a date or an owner, both versions are given.

A word, shortened.

Nonin’s name does the work a tagline might do elsewhere. By cutting “noninvasive” to its first two syllables, the company built a brand name out of its method, and its website repeats the idea in its own descriptions of “noninvasive patient monitoring.” Its product names follow a plain pattern: a word for the form or the reading — WristOx, PalmSAT, CO-Pilot — paired with a model number such as 3150 or 9590.

Its awards are mostly product and workplace honours rather than design prizes. The company lists a 2013 Frost & Sullivan product-quality award for pulse oximeters, recognition in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas awards in 2021 for the CO-Pilot, and three consecutive years as a Minnesota Top Workplace in the Star Tribune to 2025.

Readers searching online should note a name trap: on English Wikipedia, “Nonin” leads to an article about Nōnin, a Japanese Buddhist monk of the twelfth century, not the Minnesota company. The company’s own site is nonin.com, and nonin.org forwards to it.

For a design guide, Nonin shows how a technical word can be trimmed into a short, ownable name that still explains the product. Compare CAIRE, the oxygen maker whose diagnostics arm Nonin’s current chief executive once led, and Welch Allyn, another American maker of patient-monitoring devices. For this guide we use a night navy and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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