Tuesday, February 11, 1992

Working out of a small office behind a Delmar barber shop, a father and son team has created the latest in technology for detecting lung disease.

DELMAR — While most working adults today may spend their free hours watching television or pursuing other leisure activities. Harold Tomlinson and his son. Harold Jr.. have spent much of their free time for the past decade tinkering with an idea for building a better machine for measuring lung disease.

Those hours are finally paying off.

The Tomlinsons, whose company is named Inair Limited, are about to strike paydirt with their invention of a portable machine for measuring how well a person's lungs are working. Their machine is both smaller and cheaper than existing machines for doing this test, and they have sold the license for its manufacture and marketing to a Maine firm for a fee that will bring them a minimum of $800,000 over the next few years.

Initial sales are going well, and Harold Sr. is predicting that royalty revenues should reach $2 million to $3 million in a few years.

"This product is the big one for us,” said Tomlinson, whose office these days is a couple of rooms behind a barber shop in Delmar.

What makes the Tomlinsons’ story unusual is that their work harkens back to an earlier age of inventors, when the curious and persistent pursued their chimerical ideas in garages and basements. Today, high-tech medical machines usually emerge from university research labs or from the labs of high-powered manufacturers, staffed by sophisticated engineers and scientists equipped with expensive computers and testing hardware.

Much of the scientific knowledge for their lung machine did come from the younger Tomlinson. 37, who has a masters degree in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Yet ask where the idea for their portable and lightweight spirometer came from. and Harold Sr. taps the side of his head.

"Right here," he said. "There had to be a better way."

Tomlinson, 62, is a manufacturer's representative by day who has been dreaming up ideas for better medical machines for 25 years. His only other product to come to fruition was a machine to measure carbon monoxide in the blood of smokers, and that machine never made him much money.

It was too expensive. It is still in use and being sold, but there are other (machines) that do the same thing a lot cheaper.” he explained.

Inair's lung-testing machine, which is being manufactured and marketed by a company called Spirometrics Inc. in Auburn, Maine, weighs lees than 50 pounds and retails for $16,500. Existing equipment used by hospitals can weigh several hundred pounds and coat $25,000 to $40,000.

Inair’s machine can use one patient breath to measure the amount of air the lung can move in and out in a breath, the lungs’ volume and the lungs’ capacity for diffusing gases into the blood. Together these measurements provides a picture of how much the lungs may have been damaged by disease, smoking or industrial pollution.

Existing machines have many components for separating and analyzing gases so each of these three measurements can be made. What the Tomlinsons have done is build a piece of equipment not much bigger than a hunk of salami — which they have dubbed the Tomlinson Diffusion Module — that can do all three measurements at once.

To do the test, the patient inhales a mixture of carbon monoxide and helium, holds his or her breath for 10 seconds, and then exhales. The helium doesn’t diffuse into the blood, while the carbon monoxide does, and by measuring the concentration of these gases in the exhaled breath and the force of that exhaled breath, the Tomlinson Diffusion Module can extract the telling data.

In a matter of minutes, the information appears on a attached screen.

“This (module) is the key to the whole thing,” Tomlinson said.

This piece of equipment, of course, is a sophisticated complex of valves and chambers, which the Tomlinsons had to test again and again against the bigger machines until they had it down right and could show that their machine was as accurate as the bigger and more expensive ones already in use.

Harold Sr., even though he has no schooling in engineering or electronics — and, in fact, does not have a college degree — helped his son with this design and testing

How did he learn this skill?

"Just by doing it Talking to people and reading," he said.

Until two years ago he funded the development of his machine out of his own pocket. Then, in 1990, Inair received a $50,000 grant from a federal program to spur innovation among small businesses. Inair has since received another $25,000 grant from the state, and been approved for a $500,000 federal grant to take the machine and make it even smaller and lighter, which will help it gain more of a share in the international market.

The market for this machine will include hospitals. which have expressed interest in using it as a backup to their fixed lung-testing machines, and private doctors and clinics. Tomlinson hopes that it could be used also by employers screening employees for lung damage. He estimates it would cost $7.50 per employee if done on-site with Inairs portable machine, as opposed to around $150 at a hospital.

With this first commercial success, Inair has already set its sights on a spin-off product and, unlike its decade of funding the development of its lung machine out of Tomlinson’s own pocket, this time it will get grant money from the start.

The company has been approved for another $50,000 federal grant from the innovation program to design and build a machine that calibrate lung testing equipment. At the moment, the only way Inair or any other manufacturer can test the accuracy of its lung-testing equipment is against a second machine, rather than against an absolute standard, and thus it could be that both machines might be slightly in error.

Yet, even with this new success as an inventor, Tomlinson Sr. isn’t sure that he is ready yet to quit his regular job as a manufacturer’s representative.