Resmed is looking to new innovations to give the sleep health company an advantage against its competitors.
The company, which makes sleep apnea machines, masks and accessories, highlighted new features at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference in October, including the use of artificial intelligence to engage patients earlier. The company also debuted a new fabric-based mask, which it rolled out in the U.S. late last month.
MedTech Dive spoke with Resmed CEO Mick Farrell about AI, the company’s product roadmap and broader industry trends, including tariffs.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MEDTECH DIVE: At theThe MedTech Conference, you talked about Resmed’s approach to generative AI. How do you decide what generative AI projects to pursue?
MICK FARRELL: We’ve always thought that we want to be this health concierge. And this new technology provided us with a tool to say, let’s take our 36 years of sleep health, breathing health knowledge — sleep apnea, respiratory insufficiency and insomnia — and let’s create an entity that has that repository.
We’ve now got 23 billion nights of respiratory medical data in the cloud, all de-identified.
And then, of course, you can have AI go and look at all the literature, everything peer-reviewed and published in Sleep Review and Journal of Critical Care and Respiratory Medicine.
We launched this in Australia and New Zealand. It just became a good adviser to people.
Drinking water, exercising today will help you sleep at night. Not drinking caffeine after 5 pm. Not drinking alcohol after 8 pm. All that sort of sleep wellness and lifestyle coaching stuff, we put in there as well.
It’s a concierge, it’s not a doctor, and so it does not make medical recommendations or write prescriptions or anything like that.
What technologies are you watching for the future?
I talked about the generative AI on the consumer side, the concierge side, but how about using AI and helping a person as they’re in the path of therapy? We’ve launched a product called compliance coach, which helps people get more and more adherent to therapy in those first 90 days. If you see signs that someone’s slowing down their usage, you can help someone stop the churn or the quitting before it happens with just some little reminders.
On the physical engineering side, we’ve been working for about seven years on fabrics that are sort of like the bed sheets you’d sleep on. We’d had these fabric designers and fabrics engineers thinking about how we could create a patient interface that felt more like it should be in the bedroom. You’ve got cotton pillows, you’ve got cotton sheets. Why do you have medical grade rubber around your face? It’s because it’s really effective. It creates a seal.
To get that seal, we thought you needed rubber.
After seven years of work and so many prototypes, the team showed me [that] they finally have one now that can get a seal and we can mass produce at scale. So we just launched it. It’s called the AirTouch N30i. It’s the first from Resmed, the first fabric-based patient interface mask.
In the past few years, your main competitor, Philips, has pulled some of their devices from the U.S. market. How has that affected your business?
We compete in 140 countries, and that competitor’s back in 39 of them. We were taking share all the way through to 2021 when they announced that recall in the U.S. and in some other countries. They had to leave the market and have been out for four years now.
The question is, when do they come back? I don’t really know or care, because when they’ve come back in countries in Europe and Asia, they’ve had to earn that reputation. And they haven’t been able to take our share because we’ve not stopped innovating.
Someone else took that number two spot, so they have to go and fight for that back. Someone took the number three spot.
Look, I welcome competition. And that competitor we were beating before their major recall, and I think we’ll beat them after they come back.
Tariffs have been a big topic of conversation in the industry. How are you navigating that?
I’m the incoming chair of AdvaMed [beginning on] January 1. And so, I’ll be very involved in working in Washington, D.C., and working in Brussels.
Tariffs are obviously a very big part of the Trump administration. From my company’s perspective, we’ve got a long history of understanding trade. Resmed started in Australia in 1989, so we’ve always been thinking about going to global markets and how to interact across geographies.
And 15 years ago, when there was work under the Obama administration around Asia Pacific and some tariff and trade issues, we went and reaffirmed this thing called the Nairobi protocol, which provides relief for people with disabilities that includes sleep apnea, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, insomnia — the diseases and disorders that we treat. We got a letter from the Customs and Border Protection agency back then, 15 years ago, just to make sure we were safe and covered, that we were tariff-exempt.
And so when this latest round of tariff discussions was starting in January and February, we went straight back to the CBP and made sure that we still had the Nairobi protocol protections, and we did.
Rising up to all of the medtech industry, as incoming chairman of AdvaMed, I’m going to be arguing that we should have zero-for-zero tariffs. On a humanitarian basis, people should get access to medical care in Europe and in Asia and the U.S. at the same level, because we’re all humans.
You watch negotiations, and maybe it won’t be zero for zero, but hopefully it’s very small and much less than the numbers that we’ve seen in other industries.
