Many innovations in medical technology during the past 20 years have been developed by small, entrepreneurial companies. These start-up companies typically have miniscule budgets, fast time-to-market requirements and limited embedded system design experience. Additionally, they increasingly are asked to prove their technologies with functional prototypes in order to secure funding from investors.
The National Instruments Medical Device Grant program helps address these challenges by awarding up to $25,000 USD in software and services to start-ups that are evaluating NI hardware as a component of their medical device. The combination of LabVIEW and flexible, embedded hardware platforms such as NI CompactRIO delivers an ideal medical device development solution that makes it possible for companies to quickly experiment on their designs without the worry of low-level embedded programming.
Companies that have taken advantage of the medical device grant program include the following:
— Biorep Technologies – a company from Miami developing a perifusion system to assist in the isolation of cells in the pancreas for conducting diabetes research
— KNESTEL Technologie & Elektronik – a German company working on a rehabilitation robot for home use that retrains persons with neurological disturbances caused by spinal cord injury, stroke or traumatic brain injury to walk
— NuVue Therapeutics – a company from Fairfax, Virginia, working on an early diagnosis and cancer treatment method that uses an ultrasound-guided cyrothermal ablation method to deliver chemotherapy directly to the tumor
— Quantum Dental – a Toronto-based company developing The Canary System, a new approach to the early detection and treatment of tooth decay without the use of X-rays
— TecMed –a company from Albuquerque, New Mexico, that has completed a portable, fully functional prototype demonstrating the capabilities of its device design for monitoring a patient’s blood glucose levels during open heart surgery to provide immediate (“therapeutic”) feedback for the surgical team
