BME Alum Founds Company With Help From Capstone Program
Ian Jackson, who graduated in 2019 with a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering, has started a medical technology company inspired by personal experience.
As a senior in 2018, Jackson was hit by a car while riding his motorcycle. The extensive injuries led to his mentor, orthopedic surgeon and BME associate professor Daniel Latt, reconstructing his foot. However, during his time in the hospital, Jackson developed a bedsore on his heel. Now, Jackson is running Jackson Medical Solutions with a goal of addressing patient suffering with technology.
The company – for which Jackson has pulled many of his staff of five full-time employees and eight interns from the UA – creates sensing technologies for patient monitoring and treatment, starting with the OracleTM, an adjustable smart bed. The technology identifies vulnerable regions of the body, assigns risk and relieves pressure from bedsores.
“It’s the only system in the world that can actively know where a bedsore is and then compensate for it and treat it in real time,” said Jackson, who estimates the product will be on the market in a year or so.
To help develop product concepts, Jackson Medical sponsored two College of Engineering Interdisciplinary Capstone projects during the 2020-2021 academic year.
“The biomedical engineering program at the UA is astronomically better than any other engineering program I’ve ever encountered,” Jackson said. “It’s in an entirely different galaxy.”