About TickleFLEX design

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I’m Peter Bailey, the inventor of TickleFLEX. I started life building big stuff like CNC machine tools and wind turbines but now enjoy the widgets.

Fifteen years ago I had a scary tumour and had to give up half of my pancreas, leaving me with Type 1 diabetes and the need to self-inject several times a day.

I’ve never found this easy but as all diabetics know, you don’t have a choice. Most of it was the angst of possibly hitting a nerve, but also the scar tissue around my abdomen limited the suitable sites. Over using easy to reach sites became an issue.

One day after a big “ouch” I thought I would see if I could devise a tool to improve the process of self-injecting. I had a shopping list:

• Reduce the discomfort of hitting a nerve.

• Gather up the subcutaneous tissue under the needle as I might otherwise do with a pinch to improve consistency.

• Steady my hand so that I could reach further around my body to inject in more places, without going in too deep or shearing the needle.

 

The rest as they say is history.

The illustrations show how the design was simplified over 4 generations from a complex mechanical assembly to just a silicon flexure and a hub.