Name: This Biomedical Engineer Designed An Instant Pain Relief Patch
Uploaded: 2016-11-02
Duration: 3 min 44 s
Description: Shaun Rahimi shares his personal struggles with pain.

[ MUSIC ] Sean, before you talk about specifically what you're working on, just tell us a little bit about what happened to you, your experience with pain. Sure, when I was in college about six, seven years ago, I lived with a really excruciating spine pain. And I went through About two, three years of treatment. I've tried a lot of different things. During that time, there were a lot of drugs involved. I don't remember my third year of college just from the Valium, the Vicadon, the gowpentin, just the regimen I was dealing with. And going through that experience was very much how do I get off the drug, but more so, it was about a how do I find a reliable approach to solving this problem. Cuz if I get off the drug that's great but I'm still in pain or what am I really going for? I'm going for a [ UNKNOWN ] treatments problem. And so two to three years into that experience I met one of my dad's friends who's a [ UNKNOWN ] and he had a practice in Cupertino near Apple. And he brought me in and he introduced me to this thing he called a tens machine. So It's a big ice box. A lot of buttons, wires that came off these sticky pads. And it was I'm gonna shock your pain away. It was electrical pulses to the relief. That was how he explained that. And I was okay, whatever. Just let me see. I was desperate. And he put the pads on my neck, started pressing a few buttons. And within about 10, 20 seconds the pain Vanished and went away and it felt really pleasurable. So I had this experience just like, excuse me, but what the **** was that? [ LAUGH ] What the **** did you just do? It was very astonishing to experience that, and it was an epiphany of sorts. And I use that treatment. It didn't solve all my problems. It gave me a bridge. It allowed me to manage my pain so that I could sleep better, eat better. Over the course of two or three months I started working out, I starting hanging out with my friends on the weekends, something I was not doing before. And so through this process, I ended up with about 10 % of the pain from where I started. And the question was why isn't everyone doing this? [ LAUGH ] And so the question for our company has become, over the past three years, is what is a reliable approach to trading that outcome? Not only for myself, but for everyone out there that's living with pain. And we've looked at the research. And there's tens devices that are out there. They're big and bulky, they've made them small, but they're ineffective when you just Hand this Walkman version of this $ 10, 000 device off to a patient. More importantly, you've seen the industry shapes where you have not just TENS but spinal cord simulators that are delivering these really incredible outcomes, 80, 90 % relief, reductions in pain and opioid use with an implant. And so for us it's really been about how do you Take ten, something that hasn't been innovated in for the past 20, 30 years. And develop a solution that can reliably solve chronic pain. And it's not about the device only, it's about the plan that the physician has. And the problem right now is they have a plan, they don't have an alternative to the drugs. And so what we developed essentially And there's a picture of it, show it up on the stage, on the screen somewhere, yes. They pull up the picture of [ CROSSTALK ] It's essentially, it's a wearable version of this idea of a tens device, but not a traditional tens device that hasn't changed in the last 30 years. But taking the science around our modulation, what works, what doesn't work. And applying into a wearable form factor. And its designed to achieve a reliable outcome for patients, but just as important is developing a treatment that can be effective, is developing an experience that can be used and prescribed by a physician. And so you felt this patch, place it on your back, you press the button, and within about seven seconds it adjusts the therapy To a level that's suitable for treating back pain. [ MUSIC ]

Shaun Rahimi shares his personal struggles with pain.