{"id":676,"date":"2026-05-28T13:09:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T13:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=676"},"modified":"2026-05-28T13:09:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T13:09:24","slug":"prolific-east-bay-innovator-of-common-medical-devices-dies-at-age-90","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=676","title":{"rendered":"Prolific East Bay innovator of common medical devices dies at age 90"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jack Lloyd, the prolific East Bay engineer, entrepreneur and inventor, whose innovations include making the pulse oximeter, a life-saving medical device indispensable in hospitals worldwide, has died at age 90, his family announced this week.<\/p>\n

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Lloyd died May 1 in his Orinda home, with his wife, Lynne Dewar Lloyd, by his side. The couple were inseparable over their 64 years of marriage, and she died more than a week later on May 9.<\/p>\n

\u201cJack was many things to many people: husband, brother, father, and grandfather,\u201d his son Andrew Lloyd said about his father, who had five children, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.<\/p>\n

Lloyd\u2019s long and distinguished career as an inventor and entrepreneur included an early collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Manhattan Project scientist Luis Alvarez at the former Radiation Laboratory, now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Lloyd once said he was always motivated by a simple desire: to create devices that solve difficult and life-threatening problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cI invent things because they solve a problem,\u201d he said in a 2014 interview with the Bay Area News Group.<\/p>\n

One of these problem-solving devices was the pulse oximeter, which was invented in the early 1970s by Japanese engineer Dr. Takuo Aoyagi. Lloyd is credited with helping to develop the device for routine use in the operating room. He sold it through Nellcor, the Hayward- and Dublin-based company he founded in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

The device attaches to a patient\u2019s finger and is used during surgery to measure oxygen in the blood. Medical experts hailed its widespread use as a fundamental breakthrough in anesthesia, operating room safety and critical care, with Andrew Lloyd saying it was a \u201cfifth vital sign\u201d that\u2019s credited with reducing anesthesia-related deaths from 20,000 per year in the United States to mere dozens.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has been one of the most profoundly important medical devices developed in the 21st century,\u201d Reid Rubsamen, an Ohio-based entrepreneur and board-certified anesthesiologist, said in 2017. \u201cIt changed the whole landscape of how we do anesthesia. It\u2019s now the standard of care in the OR, post-op, intensive care and emergency departments; it\u2019s something we couldn\u2019t live without currently.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Lloyd was born in Berkeley and raised in Lafayette by his parents, Lester Lloyd, one of the deans of the San Francisco printing industry, and Mildred Lloyd, a librarian at Stanley Middle School. Lloyd once said his parents had one governing rule for their children: Don\u2019t walk past the Roundup Saloon, the town\u2019s legendary dive bar, which had an unsavory reputation in the 1940s.<\/p>\n

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In 1954, Lloyd graduated from Acalanes High School, where he took \u201call the science courses,\u201d edited the yearbook and rebuffed the football coach\u2019s attempt to recruit him for the Dons football team. \u201cHe was kind of a bully, and I didn\u2019t like him, so, no,\u201d he said, according to his son.<\/p>\n

Lloyd attended UC Berkeley and obtained a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering. After graduation, he went to work at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, building and designing experiments for Alvarez\u2019s Particle Physics group. Because of his contributions to the group\u2019s experiments, Alvarez name-checked him in his speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize in physics in 1968 \u2013 the only person mentioned in the speech who was not himself a physics professor.<\/p>\n

Lloyd later partnered with Alvarez, who was also a friend, in San Leandro-based Humphrey Instruments (now part of Zeiss), which made testing equipment for ophthalmologists and optometrists. With Nellcor, Lloyd grew the startup into a company with $200 million in sales. After that, he had several other medical device companies, including one that developed a system for asking basic triage questions to alert patients to the earliest signs of a congestive heart failure episode, allowing earlier and less expensive medical intervention.<\/p>\n

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More recently, his Walnut Creek-based company SafeninHome launched a system, using sensors and a two-way coaching platform, that is designed to help adults with developmental disabilities live independently. \u201cDad liked to say perhaps his greatest accomplishment was learning you \u2018could do well by doing good,’\u201d Andrew Lloyd said.<\/p>\n

Ken Traverso, the CEO of SafeinHome who formerly worked at Nellcor, noted that \u201cJack had an insatiable interest in the \u2018time-arbitrage of data.’\u201d That is, in finding new measurements that could provide time-critical data quickly and efficiently to clinicians and other professionals who know \u201chow to act\u201d and \u201cmake a difference.\u201d Traverso said, \u201cThat was a thread that ran through his whole career.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe liked to identify interesting problems, often on the edge of two fields, realizing that that\u2019s where the biggest innovations were to be had,\u201d Andrew Lloyd said.<\/p>\n

Lloyd and his wife, Lynne Dewar Lloyd, will be interred together at the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Lafayette. A celebration of life is planned for the couple on July 11 at the family\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

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One of Jack Lloyd’s innovations, the pulse oximeter, is credited with improving operating room and critical care safety and significantly reducing patient deaths. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nProlific East Bay innovator of common medical devices dies at age 90 - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=676\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Prolific East Bay innovator of common medical devices dies at age 90 - 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