O’Brien Medical develops podiatry device with UMaine collaboration
Transcript
I’m Todd O’Brien. My company is O’Brien Medical. We’re located in Orono, Maine.
I’m a podiatrist and, for years, I’ve been treating diabetics who often develop loss of feeling in their feet. That’s diabetic neuropathy.
We’ve always had different screening tests to see how they’re doing as far as their sensation is in their feet. We know they’re predisposed to having really serious complications, infections, ulcers, amputations.
Knowing that the tuning fork has always been the most sensitive test, the vibration test, people are very sensitive to it, that made me start exploring that idea of, what if we had a 21st Century version of that tuning fork by making it electronic, incorporating a timing function, which increases the power of that test. Now, we can log how long a patient actually feels the vibrations for, track that over time, and document it.
I looked around for resources to help me actually build a prototype. The first place that I actually ended up coming to was the AMC here at UMaine.
With John Belding and James Bryant we, basically, put together a plan to make a proof-of-concept prototype. I got grant money from MTI. I got in contact with Bruce Segee, who is an electrical engineer, computer scientist, on campus.
Prototypes were made. We made a batch of 10, sent them out to places around the country, academic medical centers, clinics, individual doctors’ practices.
The responses were very good. We decided we’re going to pull the trigger and make a commercial version of this which is manufacturable at scale, now, and for a cost I can afford. We actually have a contract manufacturing place down in Southern Maine called Saunders Electronics, who makes these for us.
The folks here at AMC have been excellent about working with me to come up with the best design and give me what I want functionally and ergonomically. AMC can make prototypes. The staff at the AMC, obviously, John Belding, he knows resources around the state, gave me some names of some people to look at as far as getting specific things done related to the project.
It’s really a sales and marketing effort, at this point, to build the company and get the product out.