Breath of inspiration

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) is helping a small company in the Midlands to become a leader in the non-pharmacological management of chronic disease.

It began with the commercialisation of a modest research tool and is becoming a major success story.

The product that initiated the collaboration was POWERbreathe, a simple mechanical product for training the inspiratory muscles.

'I needed a reliable way to train the inspiratory muscles so that I could examine the hypothesis that making them stronger would reduce the sense of breathing effort during exercise,' explained Prof Alison McConnell from Brunel’s Centre for Sports Medicine and Human Performance.

'To cut a long story short, I ended up having to design my own training device… a sort of dumbbell for the diaphragm that allows the application of weight training to the inspiratory muscles. As it turned out, the data supported my original hypothesis, so my then employer suggested that I might like to try commercialising it,' continued McConnell, who then had a short and successful period of running a spin-out company, until 2000, when POWERbreathe was taken over by Gaiam Ltd.