Natus Medical Receives Medical Design Excellence Award For The Olympic Cool-Cap

San Carlos, CA - Natus Medical Incorporated recently announced that it was awarded a 2007 Medical Design Excellence Award for its Olympic Cool-Cap head-cooling product for newborn brain injury. The award will be presented to Natus at a ceremony to be held June 13, 2007 in New York City.

Sponsored by Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry magazine, the Medical Design Excellence Awards competition is the only program to exclusively recognize companies and individuals for their advances and contributions in medical product design. The Olympic Cool-Cap and other medical devices were evaluated for innovative use of materials, ability of product development teams to overcome design and engineering challenges, user-related functions that improve healthcare delivery, and features that provide enhanced benefits to the patient. Entries were evaluated by a panel of judges with expertise in biomedical engineering, human factors, industrial design, medicine, and diagnostics.

The Olympic Cool-Cap is used in conjunction with the Company's Olympic CFM 6000 Cerebral Function Monitor, which aids in identifying neurological abnormalities such as hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy ("HIE"), a condition that can result from an interruption of blood flow and oxygen supply during labor and delivery.

"We are honored to receive this very prestigious award for the second time in three years, as it validates our successful R&D efforts," stated Jim Hawkins, President and Chief Executive Officer of Natus. "Through extensive customer evaluations and design feedback culminating in a landmark HIE clinical trial, the Research & Development team at our Olympic Medical division designed an important and unique medical device that will benefit these severely injured newborns."

"Once again Natus is leading the market by providing customers with products that deliver significant benefits," added Hawkins. "We were clearly a leader in the development of newborn hearing screening as a standard of care, and we expect to leverage that experience as we now look to make routine brain monitoring of newborns and head-cooling for the treatment of HIE new standards of care."

For more information on the Olympic Cool-Cap, visit the Natus website at www.natus.com. To obtain additional information on the Medical Device Excellence Award, visit www.MDEAwards.com.

SOURCE: Natus Medical Incorporated