LSI’s magazine, The Lens, recently featured Resonant Link Medical's CEO Omari Bouknight, diving into his background in medicine and experience bringing new medical technologies to market before pivoting to ask what attracted him to Resonant Link Medical and what's been most exciting since he took on the role of CEO.
In addition to exploring the critical importance of next-generation wireless power and data transfer in enabling the smaller, smarter, and longer lasting implantable medical devices healthcare innovation increasingly relies on, the article beautifully captures Bouknight's ability to design around what patients actually need, recognize where technology can make the greatest impact not just once but at scale, and turn breakthrough ideas into real-world products. They also captured his commitment to why we do what we do at Resonant Link Medical: to “have a huge impact on the trajectory of all of implantable medicine.”
Click here or continue reading to read the full profile.
Text by Brenna Hopkins
LSI Alumni Innovator Spotlight: Resonant Link Medical’s Omari Bouknight
Early in Omari Bouknight’s medtech career, he encountered a challenge he still thinks about years later.
He was working with left ventricular assist devices, or LVADs, which support patients with advanced heart failure. These complex systems need to operate continuously, requiring an implanted pump to remain connected to an external controller and batteries through a driveline that exits the abdomen.
Bouknight remembers one young woman in particular. She had developed postpartum cardiomyopathy after the birth of her son and needed an LVAD while facing the possibility of a future heart transplant. She was grateful to be alive, but she also told Bouknight how she wished she did not have to manage the controller, batteries, and driveline every day.
“She said, ‘You know, Omari, this controller, these batteries, and this line in my abdomen, I just wish that there was a way that I didn’t have to deal with all of this stuff,’” Bouknight, CEO of Resonant Link Medical, recalls in a recent conversation with The Lens.
That patient really stuck with me.
It also left him thinking about a problem that would follow him for years: Could power be transferred from outside the body through the skin, eliminating the need for that physical connection? Those same questions would help lead Bouknight to Resonant Link Medical.
Finding His Place in Medtech
Bouknight grew up with medicine woven into everyday life. Both of his parents were physicians, and his older sister became one as well. Conversations about health, patients, and patient advocacy were simply part of family life.
For Bouknight, the question became how he could contribute in a different way. “What I became really interested and excited about was the concept of scalability,” he says. “How do you take something that can impact a lot of people and help get it out to the masses?”
That intersection of healthcare, technology, and business became his path. Over more than two decades in medtech, Bouknight has helped commercialize novel technologies across cardiac rhythm management, electrophysiology, heart failure, interventional cardiology, and structural heart, a career he describes as a “tour of the heart.” His experience has spanned startups and major strategics, including Guidant, Thoratec, Cardiac Dimensions, CardioFocus, and Abbott, where he most recently led five Structural Heart product franchises.
The common denominator was innovation. “I like to be involved with innovation, something that’s in the process of being developed, something that’s new,” Bouknight says. “And I also like to be involved when you’re building something.”
Resonant Link Medical gave him an opportunity to apply that experience across far more than one device or specialty. Today, the company works across a range of clinical areas including neuromodulation, cardiac rhythm management, sensing and diagnostics, circulatory assist, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), sleep apnea, neurovascular, urinary and gastrointestinal applications, auditory and visual, and smart orthopedics. The common challenge running through these technologies is power, along with an increasing need to move data into and out of the body.
“On paper, Resonant Link Medical might appear to be a bit of a departure from what I’ve done before, but in some ways I think of it as the culmination,” he says. He now has the chance to support innovation across dozens of device categories at once. The scale that first drew him to medtech has become part of the job itself.
For Bouknight, the attraction was not only the breadth of the technology. It was the team behind it. He describes his colleagues as highly technical, patient-focused, and willing to challenge one another while still celebrating wins together.
The products, yes, but the people more so, he says. The people and the team are incredible.
When Intelligence Needs More Power
Power is one of those aspects of medical device technology that can easily fly under the radar. Patients, clinicians, and even investors may focus first on what a device treats and how it works, without giving as much thought to the energy required to keep it running 24/7.
Bouknight joined Resonant Link Medical in April 2025, as implantable technologies were becoming increasingly intelligent. Continuous sensing, closed-loop algorithms, artificial intelligence, and more sophisticated data capabilities were expanding what devices could do, while also increasing how much energy they required.
“As we started to embed more intelligence into these technologies, their power needs were going to increase dramatically,” Bouknight says. “It became very clear the direction we were going in.”
At the same time, developers (and patients) want implants to become smaller and less invasive. Bouknight describes the resulting challenge in terms of a device’s “power budget,” comparing it to the range anxiety that accompanied early electric vehicles. Engineers have to know how much energy is available and what their device can realistically accomplish within that limit.
“It might mean that you can’t deploy artificial intelligence into your device,” he says. “It might mean that the patient has to have their device replaced every couple of years because of the energy demands in the product itself.”
Rechargeable systems can change that equation, and in some applications, the battery may be eliminated altogether. A different architecture can shrink the implant, allow more flexibility in placement, and free up power for sensing, processing, communication, and other capabilities.
The more I explored all the potential applications, it became clear that they were endless,” Bouknight says. “We could have a huge impact on the trajectory of all of implantable medicine.
Powering Tiny Implants to Artificial Hearts
Resonant Link Medical has built its technology around Aurion WPT, a wireless power and data transfer platform for active implantable devices. The company notes that its Aurion WPT platform combines core innovations in coils, power electronics, magnetics, and data transfer to make implantables smaller, smarter, longer-lasting, and easy to use.
Rather than developing a therapy itself, the company works with medical device manufacturers to integrate wireless power and communication into their systems.
Three platforms address very different needs. Eterni is designed for millimeter-scale implants, delivering up to 500 mW of continuous wireless power or battery recharging through tissue and skull. It supports rechargeable and battery-free technologies for applications including neuromodulation, neural recording, biomarker sensing, and advanced sensory devices.
Vivigo addresses rechargeable implantable devices across the middle of the power range. The company launched its next-generation Vivigo platform this September, offering charging in as little as 20 minutes, as well as support for battery-free devices requiring continuous wireless power. The platform is intended to give devel opment teams a proven starting point rather than requiring them to build a wireless power system from scratch.
At the high-power end is Cardessa, which can deliver up to 15 watts of continuous wireless power for LVADs, total artificial hearts, and other high-power implants. For circulatory support, that raises the possibility of eliminating the transcutaneous driveline that Bouknight remembers so vividly from his earlier work.
Bouknight describes Resonant Link Medical’s business model as something like “NVIDIA inside or Intel inside.” Last year, the company worked with 25 manufacturers, and throughout its history, it has worked with more than 60 partners.
“I thought it would be just a fantastic opportunity to work on an enabling technology versus just working on a single product,” he says.
Helping Engineers Get There Faster
Power is not always one of the first problems an implant developer tackles. A team may begin with a clinical insight or an engineering breakthrough, then discover later how difficult it can be to deliver sufficient power through the body.
“A lot of times you get to power at the end, and then you realize how difficult it is to actually deliver power into the body,” Bouknight says.
Resonant Link Medical works with companies from the earliest stages through next-generation products. Some pre-seed or pre-Series A teams ask the company to evaluate an architecture and help them develop their product roadmap before they raise capital. Others already have approved products and want to make them smaller, more capable, or better suited to patient and clinician needs.
“The comment I hear the most is, ‘Oh, I wish that we had discovered you two years ago,’” Bouknight says.
His team can become, in his words, almost a “fractional wireless power and data team,” allowing device developers to focus more of their resources on the clinical innovation that differentiates their product.
That is increasingly important as Resonant Link Medical moves from a strong technology base toward products customers can integrate more readily.
“Our focus is on turning great conceptual technology into practical products that work in the real world,” Bouknight says. “That’s how we help advance the industry, by giving device developers solutions they can integrate and bring to patients.”
Focus on What Can Reach Patients
That transition has also shaped the company’s leadership. Ray Cohen joined Resonant Link Medical as board chair after building Axonics through commercialization and its $3.7 billion acquisition by Boston Scientific. (Read more about Cohen’s company-building philosophy in the June 2025 The Lens cover story, “A Page from Ray Cohen’s Playbook: Scaling, Exiting, and Winning in Medtech.”)
Bouknight sees particular value in Cohen’s ability to recognize which innovations have the potential to become meaningful products.
“Ray has clear insights into what it takes to make a product successful in the market,” Bouknight notes.
That perspective can be especially valuable at a platform company with many possible directions to pursue.
“When you’re working in innovation, there are so many different directions you can go,” Bouknight says. “It can be a bit of a siren song to want to pursue the science project over the product that’s actually going to have a meaningful impact.”
“Please Find a Way to Make This Wireless”
Few fields make the opportunity more tangible than BCIs.
Bouknight calls neuro “the new cardiac.” Early in his career, cardiovascular medicine was going through an extraordinary period of device innovation. He sees a similar wave taking shape across epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, stroke, depression, migraine, and other neurological conditions where unmet need remains high.
He recalls seeing the case of a woman whose neurological condition prevented her from speaking. She knew what she wanted to say, but could no longer communicate it verbally. A BCI placed on the surface of her brain was able to interpret her attempts to communicate and translate them into spoken words.
The result was extraordinary, but the system’s power requirements meant the implant was connected through a pedestal in her skull to external computing equipment.
“One of the first things she said was, ‘This is wonderful. Please find a way to make this wireless,’” Bouknight says. “That literally stopped me in my tracks.”
Resonant Link Medical is actively working in the BCI space, where the competing design needs are clear. These devices typically require substantial processing capability, yet technologies placed in or around the brain ideally need to be as small and minimally invasive as possible.
“Brain-computer interfaces are a great example because of the need to have intelligence embedded in them,” Bouknight says. “These are relatively high power-consuming devices.”
Power and Communication
Wireless energy is only part of the Resonant Link Medical story. During the interview, Bouknight makes a point of returning to another critical capability: data.
As implanted devices become more intelligent, they also need to communicate. A device might collect information about its own performance, a patient’s response, or physiological activity inside the body. Resonant Link Medical provides the communication pathway for moving data into and out of the implant, while its partners determine how and where that information is ultimately used.
“There’s also data transfer and this communication piece that we developed,” Bouknight says. “Patients want to know how their devices are behaving, and clinicians also want to know how they’re performing.”
Depending on the application, that information might move to an app, phone, dedicated hub, or cloud-based sytem for clinician review. As continuous sensing, closed-loop therapy, and AI become more common, power and communication increasingly go hand in hand.
Making Technology “Forgettable”
For all the conversation about power budgets, AI, and wireless transfer, Bouknight cites a much more human measure of success.
“We’re all patients, but at the same time, we don’t want to be seen as patients,” he says.
“We talk quite a bit about how we can make these technologies and products and systems forgettable.”
The idea says a great deal about how he views medtech. The device may be extraordinary. Ideally, the patient does not have to think about that very often.
Bouknight has also watched the role of implantable devices change over his career. Many of the technologies he worked with early on were implanted primarily because they could extend survival. Today, devices are increasingly being developed to improve quality of life as well, addressing pain, sleep apnea, urinary incontinence, migraine, neurological disease, and other conditions that can profoundly narrow how someone lives.
He compares the potential shift in wireless power to the move from wired to wireless internet. Removing the physical connection did more than make existing technology convenient. It changed where it could go, how it could be used, and what could eventually be built around it.
Bouknight envisions wireless power in terms of what it gives back: fewer external components to manage, more freedom in how an implant can be designed, and, ideally, less of a daily reminder that a medical device is there at all.
For an LVAD patient, that could mean living without a driveline connecting an implanted heart pump to an external power source. For someone with a BCI, it could mean communicating without being physically tethered to computing equipment. For a device engineer, it could mean designing around the therapy instead of around the limitations of its power source. For the next generation of implantable technologies, it could mean removing one more constraint on what is possible.
And for Bouknight, whose career has taken him on a “tour of the heart” and now into an enabling technology that could reach far beyond cardiology, the goal still comes back to the patient: technology that does its job, asks less of the person living with it, and gives them more freedom to live their life.
