Sonicaid Ltd was a medical electronics company headquartered in

West Sussex West Sussex is a county in South East England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the shire districts of Adur, Arun, Chichester, Horsham, and Mid Sussex, and the boroughs of Crawley and Worthing. Covering an ar ...

best known for its range of

Doppler fetal monitor A Doppler fetal monitor is a hand-held ultrasound transducer used to detect the fetal heartbeat for prenatal care. It uses the Doppler effect to provide an audible simulation of the heart beat. Some models also display the heart rate in beats pe ...

s. The company also developed early

ultrasound scanner Ultrasound is sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing. Ultrasound is not different from "normal" (audible) sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hear it. This limit varies ...

s. The word "Sonicaid" is in generic use for Doppler fetal monitors. Sonicaid is now a registered trademark of Huntleigh Healthcare.

Fetal monitors

Sonicaid developed a range of fetal monitors, notably the portable Doppler ultrasound products D102, D104 ("Pocket Sonicaid", winner of a Design Council Award for medical equipment in 1976), D205 and D206 which provided audible output of fetal heart sounds. The original design was due to Frederick (Doug) Fielder who was Sonicaid's medical research director. The FM series products used both ultrasound and ECG to provide continuous monitoring (recorded on paper charts), enabling clinical interpretation of changes in fetal heart rate during contractions. The FM3R received U.S.

Food and Drug Administration The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA or US FDA) is a List of United States federal agencies, federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is respon ...

(FDA) approval in 1977 and one of these instruments is displayed at the

Science Museum, London The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019. Like other publicly funded ...

(the "machine that goes ping" in The Meaning of Life is identifiable as this model).

Ultrasound scanners

Sonicaid Ltd was involved in an early venture in the development of a 3D multiplanar scanner in the mid 1970s, building on the pioneering

obstetric ultrasonography Obstetric ultrasonography, or prenatal ultrasound, is the use of medical ultrasonography in pregnancy, in which sound waves are used to create real-time visual images of the developing embryo or fetus in the uterus (womb). The procedure is a stan ...

work by Prof Ian Donald and colleagues. They also developed the Sonicaid RTS5200 Real Time Scanner which was used in hospitals for obstetric applications.

Company history

Sonicaid Ltd was based in

Bognor Regis Bognor Regis (), sometimes simply known as Bognor (), is a town and seaside resort in West Sussex on the south coast of England, south-west of London, west of Brighton, south-east of Chichester and east of Portsmouth. Other nearby towns ...

in the 1970s with a unit in

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, and in

Chichester Chichester () is a cathedral city and civil parish in West Sussex, England.OS Explorer map 120: Chichester, South Harting and Selsey Scale: 1:25 000. Publisher:Ordnance Survey – Southampton B2 edition. Publishing Date:2009. It is the only ci ...

in the 1980s. The company was acquired in 1987 by Oxford Instruments and developed the product range further as "Oxford Sonicaid".

References

{{reflist, colwidth=30em Obstetrics Medical equipment Ultrasound