An ear care device developer has ended its Indiegogo campaign after surpassing its fundraising goal to help it set up an initial production run.
Clear Ear, founded by a Stanford University-trained biomedical engineer Lily Truong and Dr. Vandana Jain, an eye surgeon, developed its Oto-Tip ear cleaning tool to soften and remove ear wax. It will use the $78,006 raised on Indiegogo to pay for tooling costs, plastic and electronic components and assembling the units. The manufacturing run starts in September and by November it expects to complete production assembly, according to its Indiegogo campaign site. The funding will also go toward the development of a deep clean device to wash out wax called TEC Home.
The device developers liken their ear cleaning device to Sonicare but for ears instead of teeth. It’s designed to help doctors and nurses clean ears of excess earwax that can cause serious complications including hearing difficulties and ear infections and obstruct doctors’ view into the ear canal. The graduate of Stanford’s StartX accelerator wants to make wax removal simpler and less costly.
“Ear health is an industry that has historically lacked innovation — people have been cleaning their ears in harmful ways (i.e. with Q-tips, pencils, & bobby pins) and we want to change that,” Truong said on the company’s website.
The founders see developing countries as one area of opportunity for the device. Before it begins work on production, Clear Ear is scheduled to go to Varni, India where it will participate in a health screening camp run by Healthy Scholars Foundation and the Community Center for Development.
Earlier this year Medtronic, in collaboration with mobile health startup ClickMedix, Icarus Design and local health clinics, started a program to improve diagnosis and treatment of ear infections and hearing loss in India.
