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National Instruments has recently created a grant program to give small, entrepreneurial medical device companies easier access to its advanced embedded design technology. The following summaries highlight the work of five first-round recipients.
TechMed Inc.
TechMed Inc. designed the first instrument to make automated glucose measurements during open-heart procedures – a noninvasive imaging option for diabetic monitoring – which results in diminished infection, faster healing, and increased mental acuity.
“The use of National Instruments PCMCIA cards and PCI boards, coupled with LabVIEW software, has provided faster development and ease of data collection, manipulation, and display. With the CompactRIO family of hardware, we expect to enhance our work, bringing a needed level of automation to our designs.”
– Alan J. Leszinske, Founder
Kairos Instruments
Kairos Instruments specializes in tools for live cell imaging with an emphasis on microscope stagetop devices for environmental control and programmed manipulation of individual wells in multiwell plates.
“We chose National Instruments for the ease of use to develop reliable multifunction instrument control devices. We believe we can provide more differentiated products for our customers with the NI development platform.”
– Doug Koebler, Founder
Cabochon Aesthetics
Formed in 2005, Cabochon Aesthetics is the ninth portfolio company from The Foundry, a premier medical device incubator. The company develops effective, scientific solutions for aesthetic procedures.
“Cabochon chose to base our breakthrough medical product design on CompactRIO hardware and LabVIEW software in large measure because of the proven track record of NI in significantly decreasing development and verification time with high-performance, reliable products that are very easy to use.”
– Tim Proulx, Systems Engineering Group Manager
Pranevicius Blood Pressure Company
The founders of Pranevicius Blood Pressure Company decided to create a more accurate noninvasive blood pressure (NIBP) measurement method and chose NI for its extensive product offering in process control, data acquisition, and analysis.
“NI produces a versatile hardware and software portfolio: the user-friendly modular and versatile graphical LabVIEW software, modular devices, multiplatform capabilities, scalability to embedded products, and field support. All these elements put novel medical device development in reach for us – medical professionals with minimal engineering backgrounds.”
– Mindaugas Pranevicius, MD, Founder
Senior Scientific LLC
Senior Scientific LLC develops methods using magnetic sensors for early disease detection and cell localization to provide treatment sooner than what is now possible. The company has received funds for research programs in breast and ovarian cancer, transplant rejection, and Alzheimer’s disease.
“NI software and hardware provided a platform that was quick to implement and provided both instrument control and data acquisition while minimizing development time.”
– Edward R. Flynn, PhD, Founder
Submit your application to the National Instruments Medical Device Grant Program.
This article first appeared in the Q4 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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