Colombian Doctor Builds $30 Device to Detect Respiratory Crises Early

Colombian physician Maria Artunduaga developed a device designed to detect respiratory crises up to 15 days before doctors can diagnose them, with a projected manufacturing cost of just US$30. Artunduaga shared her story at GoFest, Colombia’s largest entrepreneurship festival, explaining how her grandmother’s death from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD, a lung condition that makes breathing progressively harder) became the turning point behind everything she built afterward.

Her family, filled entirely with doctors, felt genuinely powerless watching her grandmother’s condition worsen in Bogota, since monitoring lung function traditionally relies on subjective patient reports rather than objective, continuous data, forcing doctors to simply ask whether someone feels better or worse on any given day.

That frustration followed Artunduaga into a business class at Berkeley years later, where she interviewed 250 patients instead of the assigned 100, discovering that more than 80% of the people she spoke with considered respiratory crisis management a serious unsolved problem despite five decades of using the same diagnostic approach. That research became the foundation for Samay, a company whose name comes from the Quechua word for “breathing deeply,” and which now holds 23 granted patents across 18 countries, including five within the United States alone.

From personal loss to respiratory crisis detection

Artunduaga’s husband, Ricardo, an audio engineer from Medellin who worked at Google, unknowingly supplied the missing piece to her puzzle, since his professional specialty involved manipulating sound and acoustics through pure software and code, turning ordinary smartphone speakers and microphones into devices capable of functioning like sophisticated hearing aids.

While interviewing a pulmonologist about how COPD patients trap air inside their lungs instead of fully exhaling it, Artunduaga suddenly remembered a physics lesson from her school days in Neiva about acoustic resonance, the principle explaining how sound changes pitch depending on the space it travels through.

That memory sparked an immediate question for her husband: what would happen if smartphones sent ordinary sound waves into a patient’s lungs, since a lung trapping extra air should make that sound resonate differently than a healthy one? Ricardo agreed the idea seemed logical, and Artunduaga immediately searched scientific literature and patent databases to see whether anyone had already pursued this exact approach, finding absolutely nothing published on the subject.

That gap became the hypothesis driving Samay’s entire research program, and the couple began testing early prototypes on weekends at home, eventually recruiting COPD patients directly through Facebook groups in California, where Artunduaga’s medical credentials helped establish trust with wary strangers willing to test an unproven device.