The pitch: AcQumen Medical’s noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring

We asked the device startups that won funding at the 13th annual Symposium on Pediatric Device Innovation in Boston during AdvaMed’s October 2026 MedTech conference to share their award-winning pitches with us. AcQumen Medical received a $25,000 bronze prize for its UltraTrac noninvasive hemodynamic monitor.

By Dori Jones, AcQumen Medical

My name is Dori Jones, co-founder and CEO of AcQumen Medical. My background is in engineering, clinical research and marketing, and I’ve spent the past 18 years supporting cardiac and critical care devices.

But on New Year’s Day 2023, my 4-month-old son was in the emergency room of our local hospital. He was struggling to breathe and I was told, “We can’t handle this here.” We were put in ambulance and sent 45 minutes away to an academic medical center where he was admitted to the ICU. Doctors tried several treatments and I remember at one point one of them saying, “There’s still more we can do.”

Thankfully for Evan there was. With the right breathing support he began to recover.

But that experience drove me to find a solution for the 600,000 pediatric patients admitted to an ICU every year, where doctors and nurses rely mostly on vital signs like blood pressure, heart rate, and pulse ox. These are late indicators of life-threatening conditions.

The better way to identify and manage these patients is to look at hemodynamics like cardiac output, a measure of how much blood is pumped throughout the body to deliver oxygen and nutrients. It’s an earlier indicator and allows for guided treatment. But to measure it accurately requires invasive catheter procedures that are high risk for these small and fragile bodies.

Fewer questions, better treatment. That’s our goal with UltraTrac, the first and only device to combine impedance — which uses electrodes on the skin like an EKG — with Doppler ultrasound over the patient’s carotid to provide cardiac output and hemodynamic parameters continuously and accurately with no needles or catheters. While there are unique features of each of these technologies (for example, this will be the smallest external Doppler probe on the market) it is the combination of the two that is novel and is the core of our intellectual property.

Impedance cardiography has been around for decades but has struggled with clinical adoption because of accuracy. It uses the pulse contour method, taking an area under the curve during systole. But if the timing of the cardiac cycle is inaccurate, you can get values that are way too high or way too low.

With UltraTrac, we use the gold standard in cardiac cycle timing. We can use our probe to tell the impedance device exactly when the aortic valve opens and closes, greatly improving accuracy and reliability of our measurements.

Since AcQumen was founded in June of 2024, we’ve built a defensible IP platform, built KOL relationships with leading children’s hospitals, leading to four IRB-approved clinical studies, and established our 510(k) pathway, starting with a Special 510(k) on our impedance device, which is already FDA-cleared. We’ll follow up with a full 510(k) submission for the fully-integrated system with modern GUI and a pediatric-specific indication.

Our timeline supports parallel progress with validation studies, final development efforts for the commercial version of UltraTrac, and FDA submission.

I have an incredible team working alongside me. Dr. Richard Summers is an emergency medicine physician and cardiac physiology expert, who was also the lead scientist for NASA’s digital astronaut project. He is developing our pediatric digital twin model for clinical decision support. David Lerner, our CTO, is an ultrasound expert with over 30 years in innovation, co-founders Mike McCormick and John Erb are veteran medtech CEOs, and co-founder Rod Houfburg lead’s AcQumen’s quality.

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Our team has decades of experience bringing devices to market, both adult and pediatric technologies, which is why we’ve already built the sales playbook for UltraTrac.

From the hospital’s perspective, early identification with UltraTrac, and guided treatment, unlocks profitability under bundled DRG payments, with NICU and pediatric ICU seeing some of the largest payments in the healthcare system. This economic benefit has been proven with continuous hemodynamic monitoring in adult ICUs.

Our medical advisors, clinical research partners, and the Pediatric Device Consortia (PDCs) here in this room have accelerated our progress to date and will continue to accelerate UltraTrac towards commercialization. And the broader medtech community sees the benefit of noninvasive monitoring as well, which is why BD is sponsoring and mentoring us in the MedTech Innovator program this year.

With grant funding, AcQumen will complete software development and V&V efforts to prepare for our 510(k) submission and a pediatric-specific label.

We want to be part of busting the myth that pediatrics is too small a market. The truth is that there is immense opportunity in pediatrics: commercially, clinically, and ethically.

My son is doing well today because of his care team. With UltraTrac as the new gold standard in pediatric monitoring, we can give those care teams the tools they need to improve outcomes.

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The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of Medical Design & Outsourcing or its employees.