I took my daughter to the GP 63 times before she was diagnosed.

Sixty-three times.  Eventually we learned she had Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD), a rare condition affecting the tiny hair-like structures that line the airways, found in roughly 1 in 7,500 children.  It can take years to identify because it looks like so many other things.  When she was just one, we were told she was simply a “snotty” child.

When the diagnosis finally came, everyone around me was devastated.  I felt relief. There was a reason.  So much of the unknown had suddenly become known, and I finally had something I could work with.

What I was working with was this: my daughter needed to do airway clearance twice a day, every day, for the rest of her life.  And the equipment we’d been given just wasn’t working.  Not because it was badly made, but because keeping a three-year-old engaged with a piece of clinical equipment, day after day, month after month, is genuinely hard.  The novelty wears off.  The battle begins.

So I decided to do something about it.

I’m not a clinician.  I studied Adventure Recreation Management, then Primary Teaching, and grew up in a family with a strong medical background - my grandfather and uncles were doctors; my mum studied nursing. What I am is creative.  I think differently.  I solve problems.  And I could see clearly that this one needed solving.

The first version was built from things I had at home: just a simple container and a narrow spout.  Instantly, bubbles were shooting to the ceiling and my daughter thought it was brilliant.  She finally understood what a “long, steady blow” felt like, and more importantly, she wanted to do it again and again.  The physios visiting monthly noticed the difference straight away.  One of them said something that changed my life: “This should be available for other children.”

That comment planted a seed that grew and grew.

I live in rural south-west Scotland, and to be honest, accessing expertise in medical device development from where I am isn’t straightforward.  It’s not like being in a city where you can walk into a university building or meet an engineer for coffee.  But I’ve never been someone who takes no for an answer, and I’ve learned that if you reach out directly, you’d be surprised who will say yes.

Through Business Gateway, I found Interface, the organisation that connects Scottish businesses with university expertise.  And that is how I found myself working with Professor Gourlay and Dr Simpson at the University of Strathclyde, giving me the biomedical engineering expertise I needed to take a kitchen-table prototype and turn it into something clinically robust.  It was a highly collaborative process, communicating mostly through email and by phone, meaning I only travelled to Glasgow when I really needed to.

I genuinely don’t know how I would have been able to access that help without all the organisations involved.

Crucially, Dr Katheryn Sharp, a paediatric physiotherapist and academic with clinical experience at Glasgow Children’s Hospital, was involved from the very beginning.  I wanted to make sure what I was building made clinical sense, not just engineering sense.  The device had to work for physios, not just for parents.

From the start, I was determined to manufacture everything in the UK.  That was a deliberate choice.  I wanted full traceability of materials and to know exactly what was going into equipment a child would use twice a day, every day.  The product is packed in a cleanroom facility in Dundee and manufactured in England.  It took longer.  It cost more.  I’d do it the same way again.

Nine years after that kitchen prototype, Bubble FLO® is a Class 1 non-sterile medical device, developed with Scottish university partners, supported by grant funding, and now the subject of an NHS clinical trial.  The trial is progressing well, and when the results are published, we’ll have the independent, evidence-based credibility that the clinical and procurement community rightly expects.

In the meantime, I’m focused on getting Bubble FLO® into the hands of physiotherapists working with children who need it.  That’s the whole point.  My mentor, someone with deep experience in medtech sales, put it simply:  Bubble FLO® is an adherence solution built to reduce exacerbations and hospital admissions in paediatric respiratory care.  That framing took me a moment to sit with, because I still think of it as something I built for my daughter.  But he’s right.  That’s what it is.

Alongside commercialising Bubble FLO®, I’m co building the Conscious FLO programme, a commitment to donate devices to hospitals and clinical settings as the business grows.  Because for me, success has never been about sales figures.  It’s about how many children get access to something that makes their daily physio bearable.  You need to be successful to give.  So that’s what I’m working towards.

If you’re a paediatric physiotherapist and would like to know more, or if you have patients struggling with engagement in their airway clearance routine, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.