It All Started When ...

The DermaFlow (DF) technology was invented by Ilya Skoletsky, an experienced electronic engineer who was one of the pioneers of the Technology Incubator Programme, devised to provide financial and technical resources to inventors and entrepreneurs.

Ilya had the idea of creating a simple, scalable and cost-effective system for measuring peripheral blood flow. (Little did Ilya know, when he started developing the DermaFlow concept, that his wife Ina would later be diagnosed with PAD, providing us a test case for the use of DF with Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) in persons with this disease.) Up to this time, the technology, costs and manufacturing features were never suitable for routine and widespread utilization. Working in the Incubator gave Ilya the resources to produce the first prototype.

Irene Jaffe met Ilya at the Incubator and realized the future clinical and commercial potential of a non-invasive sensing of peripheral blood flow. She teamed up with Ilya and Jim Kleinburd to found DermaFlow. Together, the three have supervised the development of the technology to where it is today, establishing the monitoring of peripheral blood flow as the next vital sign.

The value of vital sign measurement in determining the patient’s state of health is at the core of diagnostic medicine. In particular, vital signs can give an indication of an acute medical problem, a means of quantifying the magnitude of the illness, as an indicator of chronic disease states and as a gauge of the progress of treatment.

“Microcirculatory dysfunction plays a key role in the pathophysiology of various disease states and may consequently impact patient outcome.”

Knotzer H, Hasibeder WR. Physiol Meas. 2007 Sep;28(9):R65-86. Epub 2007 Aug 21

The role of the microcirculation in the pathophysiology of disease states has long been recognized, as has been the need for non-invasive methods of measurements.