Inventors study new ways of carrying out tasks more easily, rapidly or efficiently. Many researchers strive to achieve this, including the two partners who founded Sabirmedical. This start-up company arose from a friendship between two young entrepreneurs during an ERASMUS grant. Sabirmedical has recently joined the Bioincubator PCB-Santander at the Barcelona Science Park.

For these two entrepreneurs, work is a challenge that puts their ingenuity to the test and enables them to devise innovative solutions to meet needs in the medical sector. In some ways, the company follows the philosophy that inspired the doctor and philanthropist Earl Bakken when he founded Medtronic. Medtronic is a US multinational company that specialises in biomedical engineering. It was constituted over 50 years ago to “contribute with its products to improving human welfare and quality of life”. With this mission in mind, Sabirmedical research is focused on developing applications and expert systems that lead to improvements in some of the methods and instruments that are currently used in the following areas: diagnosis and healthcare in clinics and in the home; measurement and quantification of different physiological variables, such as blood sugar levels, arterial blood pressure or aspects as surprising as the volume of milk that an infant can drink at each feed from each of their mother’s breasts.

The two founding partners, Víctor García Llorente and Vicent Ribas Ripoll, are experts in the medical engineering sector and created the company in January 2007, in conjunction with the company Especialidades Médicas MYR, which has wide experience in the development, production and distribution of electromedical products. Doctors, specialists in physics, mathematics, design, ergonomics and computer science form part of the company’s team. Currently, work is being undertaken on new sensors and systems for analysing and processing signals. Such devices have many applications in different areas of interest, such as image diagnosis, ultrasound technologies, expert systems for medical attention and monitoring patients.

“Our products respond to the current trend of increasing prevention and raising people’s awareness of their responsibility in taking care of their own health, by means of expert systems that anybody can use easily at home to monitor different health parameters”, explained Vicent Ribas. “This will help to reduce the overuse of public healthcare services and enable possible problems or dysfunctions to be detected earlier.”

At the moment, many of their projects are still in the study phase. However, some are already very advanced. “For example, we have designed a system that quantifies the amount of milk in a mother’s breasts before and after feeding her infant. This enables her to monitor the amount of milk that the infant drinks at each feed, and therefore, to know whether she is producing enough milk for the child or whether he/she needs supplementary feeding. This information can then be passed on to the paediatrician. Thus, it will help to resolve doubts and extend the period of breastfeeding”, explains Víctor G. Llorente. This system is based on mathematical calculations and studies. It uses ultrasound techniques to detect changes in the density of a mother’s breast before and after breastfeeding an infant child. “This technique is not invasive. It works with batteries and can be used with no specialised knowledge”, he stated.