An engineer’s journey to bring the ultimate TMJ pain relief tool to market

To the average person, invention and new product development seem like pretty straightforward processes; you come up with a killer idea, do the engineering work to cobble together a working prototype, have a truckload of units manufactured, and then sell those to turn a profit. But the reality is far, far more complicated than that. However, Noam Aizenberg was able to ease some of the pain by turning to Arduino when he developed the myTMJ Pen.

The temporomandibular joint (TMJ) connects your jawbone to your skull and any disorders affecting it can cause a great deal of pain. Those disorders are surprisingly common and may affect as much as 12% of the human population, but there aren’t many good therapy solutions available to sufferers. As a TMJ patient himself, Aizenberg designed myTMJ Pen to provide relief.

As Aizenberg discovered, it takes a tremendous amount of work to bring a product to market — especially one designed for therapeutic use on the jaw muscles. myTMJ Pen combines pinpoint heat and massage, so Aizenberg also had to take safety into consideration. But Aizenberg is a recent mechanical engineering graduate and also has experience with Arduino development boards and the Arduino IDE, helping him to speed through prototype development.

The production myTMJ Pen will not contain an Arduino board, because space is at a tremendous premium. But Aizenberg did use the Arduino IDE to program the Microchip ATmega48 microcontroller that resides on the device’s custom PCB. That let Aizenberg take advantage of the familiar programming environment, the many available libraries, and the vast amount of documentation in the Arduino ecosystem.

For those interested in what it actually takes to bring a product to market, Aizenberg has documented every step of the process on his Instagram and YouTube channel. 

Aizenberg is currently seeking funding for the product launch on Indiegogo. Those funds will go towards everything from PCB fabrication to regulatory compliance testing.

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