I'm pretty sure there is a reason why a CPAP machine has to be the size it is, given it is so hated to have a mask strapped on to your face all night and have this noise. The companies who make them would have loved to make them smaller if it was possible, and there are many ways to make them smaller even using existing blower-fan technology. Reasons I can think of why it is difficult to miniaturize:
1. the pressure needs to be sufficient to open the obstruction
2. the air must be humidified
3. the appliance has to be attached to your head or it will slip out due to it's own pressure
4. it must allow for exhalation without falling off
5. there must be sufficient power to run it all night
Just as a "proof of concept" what Airing LLC should have done from the start is simply take one of their blue rubbery nose-pieces (which they have made) and rig in a couple of small tubes hooked up to a conventional blower and see what kind of power and flow is required.
Instead, they have dreamt up this "micro-blower" nano-technology which has never been created before and they have absolutely no way to know if it even works.
My guess is, Stephen Marsh, the "inventor" of this stuff (someone who has also had a number of issues on previous Venture Capitalist technological startups which ended up in court cases... just read the earlier posts in this thread) wanted to get enough money to test out his nano-tech micro-blower concept and created a "killer-application" for it in order to get enough interest to get funded. If he had said he wanted to invent micro-blowers to cool your PC chip, nobody would have bothered giving him any money. But CPAP was a noble and worthy cause, and so he latched on to that idea and sold everyone on the idea.
Let us suppose for a minute that he manages to get these micro-blowers to actually work. They may not be useful for CPAP but may come in handy for other applications. He may spin those off to another company, sell off the intellectual property or license it out. Who knows. But it is a HUGE LEAP OF FAITH for these $1,000,000+ backing community to take on the word of a couple of people who think it should technically work.
Why does Stephen Marsh and the Airing especially bother me? It hits close to home... My father uses a CPAP and my son actually needed to wear a CPAP for a few months when he was an infant (it was not a good feeling to put one of these machines on your baby every night and try to have him sleep comfortably).
I'm a medically trained professional and small business owner who had to borrow a huge amount of money to start up my office. I didn't crowd-fund the funds, I put it all on my back. Every business is a risk but I am personally accountable and because of that had to work hard and through many sleepless nights to ensure I didn't lose the shirt off my back.
Now you have Stephen Marsh and his group of experts, all fairly well-to-do professionals who could have obtained the money through loans and feel some accountability. Instead, they used crowd-funding for a number of different reasons to shield themselves in case things go sour. The idea sounded far-fetched from the beginning and it still is nowhere closer to being proven to work today than it was when they obtained their crowd-funding at 896% over-funded on July 16, 2015 (about 8 months ago).
We've already seen an update where Stephen Marsh admits it will take another $7,000,000 or so to actually make the prototypes. Where he gets these numbers I have no idea, but to imagine then their original target was $100,000? They managed to get $896,000 in their campaign time and then continued "InDemand" funding and now up over $1.2 million.... and Stephen Marsh admits he can't get the project finished without another $7,000,000.....
I would be the first one to applaud Marsh and his team if they can pull this off. I'll keep watching...
But we see so many other similar campaigns and you can't help but think this is in the same class as Skarp, uBeam, Batteriser... same scientific shenanigans and lack of functioning prototypes, hyperbole-filled rhetoric and raised huge amounts of money with nothing to show for it.