Clinical Trials Judge Innovative Ear-Care Device to be Sound

A new ear-care medical device from Tucson-based SafKan will professionally clean a patient’s ear in just 35 seconds. The startup company recently developed the first and only automated ear-wax removing headphones for clinical use called OtoSet, which was in response to a growing market demand. Every year more than 12 million Americans visit their physicians for impacted earwax removal, which occurs when enough earwax accumulates to cause symptoms such as pain, fullness, itching, odor, tinnitus, discharge, cough, or hearing loss.

With help from Protolabs’ Cool Idea Award, which included in-kind machining and industrial-grade 3D printing services, SafKan was able to successfully meet various customization requirements during OtoSet’s pivotal trial stage.

The headphones have disposable silicone nozzles that spray a warm saline solution against the walls of the ear canal while extracting the solution and wax back into the nozzles and disposable outflow containers, avoiding messy spills. For now, Otoset can only be administered by health care providers.

“It’s pretty easy to design headphones on your computer and 3D print it,” said co-founder Sahil Diwan. “But then you need to take that to the next level and start to commercialize it. Protolabs has been really helpful with our engineering team, using experience that we don’t have in-house to get our device ready to go to market.”