For many people with sleep apnea, the thought of using a CPAP Machine to sleep at night is reminiscent of trying to sleep with a vacuum cleaner strapped to your nose. The noise, paraphernalia and discomfort are more than most can bear and many just deal with the sleep apnea rather than dealing with the “treatment”. Well, that might not be an issue anymore. Airing has invented a micro CPAP device that has no hoses, no cords, and no masks. And they did it for one reason: too many sleep apnea patients don’t wear their CPAP masks at night.
Airing was the result of inventor Stephen Marsh’s working on an entirely different invention at the time. Marsh began thinking about other applications for these micro-blowers. Here is how Marsh recalls the birth of Airing:
“As I started to look at how others approached the micro fluidic pumps in the MEMS (micro electro mechanical systems) world, I saw a lot of limitations and inefficiencies in their designs. Because I am always facing volumetric and gravimetric challenges in the PowerChip world, I was able to come up with some real innovations in the design of a new micro fluidic pump.
Once I had designed these micro pumps, I realized that they could and should be built using the “roll-to-roll” (R2R) manufacturing process. I validated this with Kodak who is probably the most knowledgeable manufacturing company in the R2R space since they developed much of the science and art behind it. Using Kodak’s five foot wide machine running at 83 feet per second, it can make three million micro pumps each minute! WOW!! This makes them so low cost, they can be disposable.
My brother suffers from sleep apnea, and is what is known as “non-compliant” (he won’t wear the traditional sleep mask). In thinking of his situation, I realized that the pumping capability of my new design could just as easily be used to pump air into a small device that could fit in your nose. If the device could blow the right amount of air at the right pressure, it could revolutionize the treatment of sleep apnea. I checked the specifications of the standard CPAP machines and concluded that these new “micro-blowers” could provide the same effect but in a portable and disposable form.
I then discussed the concept with medical experts, who were uniformly enthusiastic about the potential of the micro blowers approach to treating breathing disorders. Based on this apparent feasibility and the desperate need for an alternative to the traditional CPAP masks, we formed Airing to develop the next generation CPAP breathing device.”
The Airing fits into a patient’s nose with no cords, hoses, or masks. The prototype will be the object of an upcoming Indiegogo fundraiser planned for June, 2015. For more information on this new idea for sleep apnea, you can go to Airings Website for more details.
