The Award-Winning Medical Device With A Design Inspired By E-Cigarettes

Nebulizers are cumbersome, to put it mildly.

A nebulizer is a toaster-sized device to deliver medication in the form of air particles. Users plug the machine into a wall socket and insert a medication, often albuterol, which is aerated into an inhalable water droplet. The user breathes from the nebulizer mouthpiece for around seven to 10 minutes while a steady stream of medication enters the user’s lungs. 



“The problem with that,” says Convexity Scientific, Inc. CEO Jim Daniels “is that it’s inherently non-portable. Those patients are really trapped in the home or a clinic to get the medication they need.”

The Flyp nebulizer is small and portable for on-the-go use.Credit: Convexity Scientific, Inc.

The Flyp is the first product from Convexity. It’s a portable nebulizer that Daniels and Convexity Executive Vice President Geoff Matous believe is the smallest, lightest, and quietest on the market. Though patients with milder asthma issues can use inhalers, for patients with more serious cases who need more frequent or heavier doses of medication, a nebulizer is required. Nebulizers are also often recommended for patients who have coordination issues, as a standard inhaler isn’t automated and requires the user to push while inhaling, which can be difficult for some to correctly do while winded or tired.  



The portable nebulizer was the brainchild of someone intimately familiar with the medical needs that surround COPD and asthma: Dr. Ralph Finger, an emergency room doctor in New York City and Convexity's current co-founder and chairman. Not only did he see a portion of the nearly 1.7 million people who annually visit and leave the emergency room with asthma as their primary diagnoses, but his wife, daughter, and mother all have respiratory issues as well.  He analyzed the flaws of most nebulizers aside from their bulky size, like how many pieces they had and the difficulties of keeping them clean, and started to formulate his own idea for a smaller nebulizer that would be less cumbersome to use. He looked at inspiration across various fields and eventually found inspiration in an unlikely source: e-cigarettes, which heat liquid to generate an aerosol; the "vapor" behind vaping.  While they had no health value whatsoever, their and portable delivery of airborne particles served the basis for how to create a similar device for medications. They were also small, lightweight, and fairly inexpensive to produce. 

An early sketch of the portable nebulizer concept from Dr. FingerCredit: Convexity Scientific, Inc.

In 2012, Finger started sketching designs for the Flyp nebulizer on a napkin and had sourced a Chinese manufacturer by 2014. At that point, he officially formed Convexity and hired his staff: consumer branding and packaging professionals, not just scientists. He wanted the Flyp to be eye-catching and easy-to-understand. And more importantly, he wanted it to appeal to consumers, not just medical professionals. He brought on Daniels, a consumer branding executive who developed packing for direct-to-consumer wellness brands, including Trojan condoms. And he brought on Matous, who worked in neurosurgical device sales and developed an in-depth understanding of the field. “I was a healthcare guy who also did sales,” Matous says. The goal was to make the Flyp into a successful consumer-facing medical device that would be top-0f-mind with most buyers, as Daniels had done with condom brands. 



Together, the team went to work, developing consumer packaging and branding aimed to reach modern consumers with active lifestyles. They went away from the traditional medical device marketing model of doctor visits and instead communicate digitally with doctors, sending them information they can browse and pursue on their own schedules. For consumers, the marketing strategy is almost exclusively digital. Their team of five sales and marketing people — out of a company of just 10 —  pays close attention to how long users spend on the Flyp website and what pages are most popular. They're constantly running tests to see which channels develop the most loyal visitors. 



While consumer education isn’t the challenge it is with more complicated medical devices, they still have to work on brand loyalty. “The name ‘Flyp’ speaks to how easy it is to use,” says Daniels. “[Buyers] will open the box and look for more pieces before they realize it’s self-contained in just one piece.” Their goal is to rebrand nebulizers as being adaptable to one’s life, rather than having to adapt one’s life to using a nebulizer. Their packaging is bright, modern, and clear, and at a $200, the Flyp isn't prohibitively expensive to most consumers.

The Flyp comes in clear, easily digestible packaging/Credit: Convexity Scientific, Inc.

Because the Flyp is an FDA-approved medical device, both Daniels and Matous stress that while branding and approachability are important, functionality and performance are the first priorities. To that end, every Flyp is tested no less than eight times to ensure it's both properly assembled and that it delivers the medication into the correct droplet size for optimal breathing and absorption into the lungs. “One thing that’s at our core is improving the health outcomes. About 40 million Americans have asthma or COPD and the economic cost from the Center for Disease Control is about $56 billion per year,” says Matous. “It’s a huge tax on our healthcare system.”
The Flyp was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 and was introduced to consumers in June 2018, though Convexity has raised more than $4 million to date in seed funding and venture investments.  Based on 2016 numbers, the value of the U.S. nebulizer industry was $254.2 million in 2016. Matous and Daniels estimate based on their consumer data and research that that’s about 700,000 nebulizers sold every year. They’re hoping to capture 20 percent of that market by their second year of business. For year one, they’re on track to sell at least 25,000 based on their sales since the launch. 
In March 2018, the Flyp won the New Product Pavilion Providers’ Choice Gold award at the spring MedTrade expo,  the largest trade show for medical equipment in the U.S.   

Lake Tahoe-is a  professional writer and decidedly non-professional outdoor enthusiast. On Forbes, He write about the process of how unique consumer products go from ideas to fruition, from specialized ski gear to groundbreaking technological inventions. he originally...

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