As a kid and a young man Michael Seres, the founder and CEO of 11 Health, was plagued by Chrons disease and intestinal problems. Eventually, this required him to have an intestinal transplant, just the 11th ever performed in the UK. The surgery left him with a permanent companion, an ostomy bag. Tapping on business skills he developed creating product merchandising for TV shows like The Apprentice and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, he created a better ostomy bag and launched 11 Health.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Randy Scott: 0:40

For those of you expecting the wisdom of Richard Miles, I apologize, but this is your guest host today, Randy Scott, and I'm here today for Radio Cade, with Michael Seres, the founder and CEO of 11 health and the inventor of the Alfred smart optimi bag. Hi Michael, thanks for joining us today. It's going to be interesting to chat about this. So as we normally do here, Michael, we'd like to start actually with having you explain and, you know, fairly simple terms, just what the Alfred smart bag is and why it's important.

Michael Seres: 1:16

Sure. Let me start by explaining a little bit about, an ostomy, typically, an ostomy is where part of your intestine is brought to the outside of your tummy and you have a bag attached to that part of the intestine. And that's known as an ostomy bag. And most people I guess understand about a colostomy bag, but it's generally after surgery that would come from either bowel cancer or inflammatory bowel disease and where your bowel either needs to rest or isn't working. The part of the intestine is brought on the outside and those bags traditionally are collection vessels. They fill up and they leak and spill. And when you've had that surgery, part of your nerve endings is cut. And so you don't actually know when those bags are filling and what's happening to them. It's kind of like a diaper as it feels, and you don't necessarily know when to change it. And so what I did really, after my own experiences as an ostomy patient was to deconstruct an existing bag and rebuild it with a series of senses inside. And those senses are mainly temperature, sensors, and capacity senses that out. You understand when the bags have failed, that the sorts of senses that you would have in a car there , you know, sometimes the cars beep when you get too close to another car or when you're crossing over a lane. And so I integrated those senses into an optimi bag, and now they will send a signal to my cell phone when my bag is filling. And so it can prevent the leaks and the spills. And what it also enables us to do is send that information to the doctors so that they can help manage mine and other people's conditions better. As an example, if you have too much output in a day, you are prone to dehydrating and if you have too little out put in a day, it might indicate there's a blockage or there's some inflammation in the intestines . So your doctors need to know that data in real time. And currently the existing bags don't do that.

Randy Scott: 3:24

So you've mentioned that you're an ostomy patient yourself, so I guess you kind of come by this vention honestly, so to speak and you and I have already talked about this a little bit of course, but maybe for our listener