Spacelabs Healthcare Brand Guidelines: The 1958 Astronaut Telemetry Maker Owned by OSI Systems

A name taken from its first mission.

Spacelabs began in 1958, when its co-founders Ben L. Ettelson and James A. Reeves started working with the US Air Force and NASA, according to the company’s own heritage page. Wikipedia gives the same year and the same two names, and says the founders set out to build cardiac monitoring and telemetry systems that could follow astronauts’ vital signs from the ground during the early American space flights. The company says that first mission also gave it its name.

The space story is the core of how Spacelabs Healthcare presents itself today. The company says it became a prime contractor to NASA for the Gemini and Apollo programmes. It says its telemetry was part of the Gemini IV flight in June 1965, when Edward H. White II became the first American to walk in space, and that in July 1969 Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon wearing a Spacelabs telemetry system. It also says NASA gave the company a certificate of appreciation for its work on Apollo, and its heritage page shows the astronaut Thomas P. Stafford presenting that certificate to Jim Reeves.

The move from spacecraft to hospital came quickly. The company says it brought its technology to civilian healthcare facilities in 1966, and that by 1968 it offered a range of bedside monitors and central station monitors watching several patients at once. By the early 1970s, it says, it was installing what it called the “Apollo 70 Cardiac Care Monitoring System” in American hospitals, with astronauts including Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell attending some of the dedication ceremonies. Wikipedia says the company was inducted into the Space Foundation’s Space Technology Hall of Fame in 2020.

Squibb, Instrumentarium, OSI.

Spacelabs has had a long run of owners. Wikipedia’s timeline says the drug company Squibb acquired it in 1980, that it became part of Squibb’s Westmark International in 1986, and that Westmark spun it off in 1992, when it began trading on Nasdaq under the name Spacelabs Medical. As an independent company it bought other businesses: Wikipedia lists Consolidated Peritronics Medical in 1995 and the electrocardiograph maker Burdick and Advanced Medical Systems in 1997, and says Spacelabs launched its Ultraview care network in 1998.

In 2002 the Finnish group Instrumentarium bought Spacelabs, and Wikipedia says it was combined with Instrumentarium’s medical division, Datex-Ohmeda. That arrangement lasted only months. When General Electric set out to buy Instrumentarium, competition regulators on both sides of the Atlantic looked hard at patient monitors. On 2 September 2003 the European Commission cleared the takeover by GE Medical Systems on condition that GE sell Instrumentarium’s Spacelabs business, including its worldwide patient monitoring business. The Commission’s press release described Spacelabs as a US-based patient monitor maker that Instrumentarium had acquired the year before, and said the merger brought together two of the four leading players in patient monitors in Europe.

In the United States the Department of Justice filed a complaint on 16 September 2003, together with a proposed final judgment that required the full divestiture of the Spacelabs business, which the department described as Instrumentarium’s primary operation for critical care monitors, and of the Ziehm C-arm business. The Commission said it had worked closely with the Justice Department on the case. Wikipedia adds that Burdick went separately to Quinton Cardiology Systems.

The buyer of Spacelabs was OSI Systems, of Hawthorne, California, which completed the purchase in 2004, according to Wikipedia. In 2005 OSI bought Blease, the British anaesthesia equipment maker, and merged it with Spacelabs Medical to form a new company, Spacelabs Healthcare. The British diagnostic cardiology company Del Mar Reynolds followed in 2006. In 2014 OSI added the German defibrillator maker Metrax, known for the Primedic brand, and in 2017 sold it to the Chinese company Yuwell, Wikipedia says.

Monitors, defibrillators and the ward.

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.

Two divisions under OSI Systems.

The company kept narrowing and widening its range under OSI. Wikipedia says Spacelabs Healthcare moved its headquarters from Issaquah to a building it bought in Snoqualmie, Washington, in 2013; that in 2019 it ended the production and sale of its whole anaesthesia product line, with support for those products set to end on 30 June 2026; that it acquired BoxView in 2020; and that in 2023 it bought PeraHealth, a predictive analytics company. Wikipedia describes it as a wholly owned subsidiary of OSI Systems with two divisions, patient monitoring and connectivity and diagnostic cardiology, employing more than a thousand people.

Its own website carries the same ownership line in its footer: Spacelabs Healthcare “is a wholly owned subsidiary of OSI Systems, Inc.” The monitoring side of its catalogue includes the Xprezzon bedside monitor, the compact Qube and the Qube Mini transport monitor, the Xhibit central surveillance stations and the AriaTele patient-worn telemetry system. The diagnostic cardiology side covers Holter analysers and recorders such as the Eclipse Pro, the CardioExpress resting ECG range and OnTrak ambulatory blood-pressure monitors. The site also sells a software service under the Rothman Index name, and the supplies and accessories that keep the monitors running.

The company still tells its story through that origin. Its home page opens on the idea that “everything starts with a mission” and returns to the founders’ work with NASA scientists and engineers; its heritage page is built around Gemini IV and Apollo 11.

For a design guide, Spacelabs Healthcare shows how a founding story can stay in a brand’s name long after the company has changed owners several times. Compare GE HealthCare, the healthcare business of the General Electric whose purchase of Instrumentarium led to the sale of Spacelabs, and Philips, another maker of patient monitors. For this guide we use a navy, a teal and an off-white with a technical sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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