Andrew Kyle 990 connections

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My position at Compaq (later HP after the merger between Compaq and HP), was to manage ProLiant software development and QA for ProLiant server development. My position was part of the core development team that managed the entire server development processes and rollout. During my time at Compaq/HP, I worked on the ProLiant Models ML350 (most popular Server in the world), ML300, and the DL330. Compaq had the most mature development processes of any company I had worked at. The development processes had been honed since Compaq first invented the server and were modeled from Texas Instruments where the founders of Compaq originated. Interesting, the first IBM compatible was designed on a paper napkin at a House of Pies in Houston. The ID designer, Ted Papajohn, who modeled its first product, was working as a consultant for Life-Tech at the time and I can remember when he came to work after a breakfast meeting and told my Life-Tech team about his meeting and the plans to develop a portable IBM PC clone. Lost opportunity to purchase the stock of the startup which became the fastest growing company to $1Billion in sales in USA history at that time.

Telxon was a $400M mobile hand-held PC and 802.11 wireless manufacturer and vendor. It was the successor to a Houston company that introduced one of the first handheld devices for inventory management in the mid-1970s. The company was purchased and the development and manufacturing were divided with development relocating to Akron, OH. As the company grew, the logistics of development manufacturing support and rollout became geographically challenged and the decision was made to relocate the development offices to The Woodlands, TX about 30 miles from the Houston factory. I joined Telxon during that migration and worked at The Woodlands development facility. Telxon had very large customers like Wal-Mart. I started by being the Project Manager for the PTC-1124, pen-based, wireless handheld. During my tenure, my project grew to include PTC-2124, PCT-2134, PTC-1800 (one of the first VoIP devices introduced to the commercial market using an 802.11 wireless backbone). Telxon had great technical resources and development teams that remain connected and network frequently. Its major competitor was Symbol, which also made the bar code scanning engine that Telxon integrated into its products. After successfully turning around the company, Symbol Technologies purchased it. Most technical resources elected to find new positions. The CTO was David Biggs whose commitment to PMP and Professional Project Management made much of the turnaround possible and remains one of the best technical managers I have ever met.

Managed and directly designed several hundred Class II/III medical devices. Member of the BOD and VP since age 27. Life-Tech initially introduced devices used to measure eye-movements. The eye dipole is amplified by a differential amplifier and transduced into a graphical representation on a chart or computer screen much like an EEG. Caloric stimulation of the semicircular canals, transduce temperature gradients into eye movements with the patient supine and without head movement. The eye movement activities (ENG) are analyzed for abnormalities for a differential diagnosis of equilibrioception. We next developed devices used to measure electromyography and evaluate sensory nerve conduction velocites for muscular diagnostic purposes. These devices included invasive needle electrodes (monopolar and multi-sensors) used during the procedure to measure the electrical activity of specific muscles and the more detailed muscular stuctured therein. NCV (nerve conduction velocity) measurements could be used to localize nerve pathology by applying a voltage stimulus to the peripherial muscle and initiating a muscle contraction and then measuring the latency using surface electrode placed over the sensory nerve at a known distance. We next developed the first electronic uroflow meter and pioneered the field of urodynamics with the UROLAB, UROLAB JANUS, UROVISION and other associated medical devices used not only for urological dysfunction quantification but also for early studies in male impotency and its etiologies. Numerous accessory devices - pumps (UroPump), sterile catheters, wire electrodes used to measure the electrical activity of the urinary sphincter, and other sterile kits and accessories were developed to complement the measuring devices. Life-Tech also developed averaging computers and very high-gain amplifiers used to extract sub-microvolt electrical activity from EEG. The stimulus is applied repeated times and the averaging computer recorded the time locked EEG, adding it to the sum of the previous responses. The computing process improves the S/N ratio by the square root of the number of samples taken and can extract the stimulus time-locked submicrovolt evoked potential signal from backgound EEG several hundreds of times its amplitude. My team designed these devices and the complementary electrodes for ERG, VER, EOG, ABR, ECOG and other somatosensory evoked potentials. Life-Tech purchased Professional Instruments and integrated its Peripheral Nerve stimulators into its product line. These devices are used during surgery to monitor muscular relaxant dosage. Typically a nerve near the wrist or ankle is stimulated with a brief electrical current stimulus (electing one of several different time stimulus pattern – single, tetanic, etc.) and the thumb twitch is appraised (generally by eye) that subsequently occurs in a non-paralized patient. As muscle relaxant is administered, the muscular response is exterminated as the MR drug occupies the acetyl choline receptors on the muscles end plates. The anesthesiologist titers the MR drug dose until the muscular response is just extinguished. As surgery continues, the anesthesiologist administers additional MR as required to keep the the thumb twitch extinguished. This process ensures that the patient recovers respiratory function promptly after surgery is completed. More recently, the use of regional blockade devices (Nerve Locators) and Regional anesthesis kits have become more widely used as outsurgery practices have grown. Another field that Life-Tech developed medical devices for was iontophoresis - ionic transdermal drug delivery using electrical current. This technology, while useful, has patient-to-patient variances that made the "dose" level in mA-minutes difficult to quantify. Other factors such as drug site blood flow, suppressed by administring ephinephrine by iontophorosis before driving the drug through the skin, the treatment drug choice and complicating factors such as minor skin burns made its used in clinical practice difficult to control quantatively. Many patients appeared to benefit from transdermal delivery of steriods and it has been used in sports medicine and to treat TMJ. We also developed and manufactured medical devices for biofeedback (used to retrain children on the physiological normal way to void). Some children, learn to urinate incorrectly by contracting their urinary sphincter while simultaneously contracting their bladder. Not only do these children have residual post void urine but the high voiding pressure causes urinary reflux into the kidney and may result in serious kidney damage over time. The biofeedback device, pioneered by Naiel Galloway and Casey Furlit, gave the child a easy way to understand if they contracted their urinary sphincter while voiding ... a bar of lights and a sound they could hear would change as they contracted or relaxed their urinary sphincter. The urologists made a game of this retraining... make the angry bee go back in the cave... while the child urinated. They had to relax their sphincter in order to do so. Worked well when the urologist had sufficient time to spend with the child and its parents. We also did work in GI and pH esophageal measurement devices.

Worked with Sakowitz Computer Laboratory with a team lead by Donald Glaeser. We worked for Michael DeBakey and developed the first clinical EKG digital monitor system using DEC mini-computers. This system was funded for by an NIH grant that was funded to its completion. The system had two beds in the cardiovascular ICUs for Dr. DeBakey's most life-critical patients. The analog EKG monitors analog outputs were digitize, analyzed and compressed to feed a larger monitoring PDP-12 which maintained trending information on the patient that the cardiologist could review at the patient bedside via an attached computer workstation in realtime. The software would analyze the EKG and look for abnormal electrical activity, count how many and what types occured, and, upon exceed thresholds, alert the ICU nursing staff that the patient had experience abnormal EKG activity for their intervention. A "blood monitoring" system was also designed with a monitor mounted above Dr. DeBakey's surgical rooms where blood gas level and other operative data could be displayed immediately after it was analyzed, improving his ability to manage the patient during open heart surgery. During this time, I had many other smaller projects at Baylor College of Medicine and at Methodist Hospital at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.