CPAPtalk.com

well all great suggestions already, so I will just chime in on cosmetics..

how about some hot metallic colors?

A small portable machine with low power draw with a battery that can be recharged in a day by solar panel. I am talking about a CPAP user being able to backpack in the back country, remote from any civilization, for as long as he or she wants. Weight and volume are a big issue for backpacking.

add a noise port so that we can port the noise out of the room via a plastic pipe

All really good ideas so far, I want to ditto to all of them.
I would like to see a couple of ports for being able to plug the air hose ether in the front or back or sides.

Stormynights wrote:I think one machine with different modules would be nice. You could have a basic cpap machine and add auto data and any options with just a module without having to buy a new machine for an upgrade. I also hope you will try your hand at designing new masks. Do you use cpap?

Everyone of u is my perfect User ...thank u for this, I hope to answer all your questions, and will make solutions!
But I want to start with stormynights' topic, cause I thought about one basic machinery where I can add all options!
I sow that the Cpap system is very similar than Bipap...so I thought to design one unique basic outer shell for these 2 systems (so i have 2 machineries with same design...this to not confuse the users in the choice...because I see on web, that there are many different machineries, and I don't understand the difference between them), and than the users could decide with their doctor which system is better for them( cpap or bipap) and then optionals to add at the machinery!

ah someone asked me if I design also the mask...Ya have to do it!

Very interesting work,
nite!

ps: the last thing, now US or Canada etc... How do u buy this type of machinery? do u have any health grant?

Problems:

1. Headgear that ride up and change the pressure being applied
2. Leaks around the seal, both mask and pillows
3. Cold nose (unless you use a heated hose)
4. My pillows have an adjustable metal strip that you can easily bend for best fit. unfortunately, it can also bend easily----accidentally.
5) A humidifier that initially warms the water but can't keep up with the cooling caused by evaporation.

Easy to understand instruction manual that is not technical... maybe also a quick-see chart that you can just look at the pics and see what you have to do.

The "cosmetics" suggestion was a good one. These things are so darned ugly that the only "positive" I can imagine is that a burglar would be scared away if he saw me in mine. Surely there is a way to make them less hideous. I feel as though I'm a gas warden during World War II!

Video tutorials--for everything.
Free efficacy software.

M.D.Hosehead wrote:Good ideas are cheap; Just sitting in an easy chair for an hour I can have a two or three.

Implementation is the hard part. If you know how to do that, omit the OP and get rich.

Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

While I'm also glad to see energetic young engineers jumping into the game I'm also pretty skeptical that he'll meet with success.

I've been a medical device designer for more than 20 years now. In fact, I'm now the CEO of a medical research device company. One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that the CPAP market is the LAST place I would want to go with my company. Market factors in this space make machine design a nightmare. After taking a hard look at it I can't see any possible way a new company could enter this market with any hope of success.

I honestly can't even understand how the players already in the CPAP game are able to survive. I suspect that at least a few of them use the CPAP market as a loss-leading training ground for new engineers. At least that's the way it looks judging from the Respironics SysOne I just got. If somebody asked me who designed this piece of junk I would have said "five monkeys with a sketch pad". It's got to be one of the poorest, least effective designs I've ever seen in the medical field. And yet, it's one of the market leaders. Shows just how little effort the big boys put into these things.

(In all fairness I will admit that there are some very, very nice design features in the flow system. I suspect, however, that the aerodynamic design was farmed out to a engineering subcontractor that specialized in that field. The blower is obviously not the work of the same designers as the housing and electronics.)

More power to our young designer and best of luck to him in his effort. I suspect, however, that he's soon going to find that the gap between design perfection and market reality is waaaaaaayyyyyyyy too big when it comes to CPAP. I hope I'm wrong - for everybody's sake.

Cheers,
XJ.

xj220c wrote:

I've been a medical device designer for more than 20 years now. In fact, I'm now the CEO of a medical research device company. One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that the CPAP market is the LAST place I would want to go with my company. Market factors in this space make machine design a nightmare. After taking a hard look at it I can't see any possible way a new company could enter this market with any hope of success.


XJ.

Do you think it would make a difference that the designer is working for an Indian company?

M.D.Hosehead wrote:Do you think it would make a difference that the designer is working for an Indian company?

I don't think who's designing it is the issue. It's the market itself that limits the introduction of new designs and technology.

After looking at these machines and using one myself I could whip up and test a radical new design in about twelve months that solves 90% of the problems people have complained about in this thread.

I could then launch it on the market and lose $10-20M with it within the first year.

The barriers to entry in this market are so ridiculously high there's no way a new company could jump in - at least not without betting enormous sums of cash on a long-term, low-potential return. If somebody is going to bust this market they would need to do it with some sort of radical new technology and even then they'd be better off just licensing it to one of the existing big players.

Unfortunately I think the only advances you're going to see in these devices are going to come from the likes of Phillips and ResMed banging away on each other for market share. That's going to be a slow and painful process for the end-users. We'll probably just have to live with what's out there.

Cheers,
XJ.

Out of curiosity what are the barriers to entry?

I worry that when I am asleep I might accidently knock the unit off the bedside table (I did this on the only night that I have slept away from home since I have begun using it and it was full of water!).
I would like an easy, secure way to "anchor" it to the bedside table.

snoozysue wrote:I worry that when I am asleep I might accidently knock the unit off the bedside table (I did this on the only night that I have slept away from home since I have begun using it and it was full of water!).
I would like an easy, secure way to "anchor" it to the bedside table.

Don't fight gravity put it on the floor. Mine has never fallen off the floor. It should be lower than your head anyway.