Our Story

BAM Labs founders, Steve Young and Rich Rifredi, worked together at Apple developing Award Winning mobile computers. During their combined 22 years and countless projects at Apple, the two developed a discipline for creating products that put the user experience first. Successful products had to be easy to use, solve a problem better and more cost effectively than current solutions and had to have a bit of “magic” to exceed expectations.

After Apple Steve and Rich got the entrepreneurial bug and started their own companies-Steve at Cepheid (NASDAQ: CPHD) and Rich at Pixo (acquired by Sun Microsystems), but remained friends and often talked about starting a company together.

In 2001, Rich’s son Reese was born 12 weeks premature. Reese spent 10 weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit and was monitored 24 hours a day 7 days a week. When it was time for Reese to leave the intensive care unit, he was sent home with an infant apnea monitor, a device with three wires that attached to Reese and sounded an alarm when his breathing or heart rate became too low or too high. Unfortunately, the device had many false alarms and Rich and his wife Cassi stopped using the device and slept in 4 hour shifts taking turns watching Reese breathe. Rich told his friend Steve about his frustration with existing wired health monitors and challenged Steve to come up with a better solution. It was a tough challenge. Steve talked with a lot of engineers who said he couldn’t build a touchless health monitor and get enough accuracy to be meaningful. Steve loves to prove people wrong.

Fast forward to 2006. Steve and his good friend Jim Williams, legendary analog circuit designer and former MIT professor, discussed a project Jim worked on at MIT. Jim’s team wanted to build a highly sensitive scale. However, the movements of blood flow through the body made his measurements inaccurate. A light bulb went off in Steve’s head. Using a similar approach to Jim’s scale, Steve could measure the vibrations from blood flow and lung expansion to create a vital statistics sensor. Later that year, Steve and Rich formed BAM Labs (BAM is an acronym for Body and Motion) with the mission to provide touchless health monitoring that everyone can afford. 4 years later with the help of a talented team and advice from world experts in the medical and electronics field, BAM Labs has developed a revolutionary health monitor that is effortless to use and a fraction of the cost of existing vital statistics monitors. And to prove the doubters wrong, Steve designed the BAM Biometric Sensor to be completely touchless to provide a bit of magic and exceed our customer’s expectations.