I’m an engineer, having grown my career building big stuff like CNC machine tools and wind turbines.

Sadly twelve years ago I 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 caused variation in the speed at which insulin was absorbed.

One day after a particularly nasty nerve strike 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 and here is how I arrived at the final version of TickleFLEX.