Call this Minneapolis company’s product the executive solution for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Bordewick used to oversee product design for Medtronic and California-based Nellcor Puritan Bennett. Seeing potential in the growing sleep apnea market, he founded AEIOMed in 2002 to develop a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device that would be more portable and more comfortable to wear than the traditional machines are.
“We wanted to design a CPAP that was adapted to the lifestyle of the user, versus a user adapting to the CPAP,” Bordewick says. “Something small enough that we could put into a briefcase.” If CPAP treatment were easier to live with, the thinking was, more people might benefit from it. More than 25 million Americans are believed to have OSA, “only a little more than 10 percent of it diagnosed,” Bordewick says. Of those diagnosed, “only about half of them stay with the therapy. In the last several years, the link between heart disease and stroke and OSA has become much more established and accepted.”
In August, AEIOMed signed a distribution deal with Ohio-based Invacare, one of the largest players in the home-care industry. Invacare specializes in high-volume, low-margin “bent-metal” products such as walkers, wheelchairs, and bedpans. “Their problem was that they didn’t have any technology,” says Ralph Germscheid, AEIOMed’s executive vice president. “They were looking for a market segment that had growth and a large potential.” AEIOMed, he adds, now has “a very large organization selling our product,” and will develop additional products for Invacare’s needs.
