CareForge
A support app for the families and patients who depend on legacy home medical equipment, connecting them with verified technicians, replacement parts, and peer caregivers when manufacturer support has long since disappeared.
Family caregivers and adult patients dependent on home ventilators, iron lungs, BiPAPs, and other legacy respiratory equipment
- Vetted technician directory filterable by equipment make/model, with response-time SLAs and reviews
- AI troubleshooting assistant trained on legacy device manuals that walks through error codes step-by-step
- Parts marketplace aggregating surplus hospital inventory, 3D-printed adapters, and refurbishers
- Maintenance schedule with reminders, emergency contact card printable for first responders, and a peer caregiver chat scoped to the patient's specific device
Martha Lillard's family publicly described being unable to find anyone to service her iron lung, and her death marks the literal end of an era. The roughly 1,500 home ventilator users in the US and thousands more on legacy BiPAP/CPAP face the same vanishing-support problem every year, with no dedicated platform.
Martha Lillard's death confirmed across major outlets, validating the painful reality of vanishing support, but the addressable population is genuinely tiny — only ~1,500 US home ventilator users per the idea, with iron lung users now zero and legacy BiPAP/CPAP users in low thousands.Martha Lillard - Wikipedia ↗Last known American using iron lung dies in Oklahoma | KOSU ↗
No US consumer-facing app combines verified legacy-respiratory-equipment technicians, parts sourcing, and peer caregivers — Ontario VEP/LIVE is government-funded and Canada-only; ResMed myAir and Philips apps are manufacturer-bound to modern devices; Medall and Lucid Equipment are equipment resale, not repair/community.Home - Ventilator Equipment Pool ↗myAir™ patient support software and app - ResMed ↗Lucid Equipment | A Transparent Marketplace for Medical Equipment ↗
Even with $50-150 per house-call technician dispatch (per Motion/Superior/MedRepair pricing patterns), a TAM of a few thousand legacy users caps revenue in the low six figures annually; subscription monetization is constrained by the very small, non-recurring-equipment-buying population.Service & Repair Department - SUPERIOR Home Health Care ↗Repairs & maintenance - Motion ↗
The 'legacy' framing is inherently dying — iron lung users are now zero in the US, polio survivor cohort is shrinking, and manufacturers are actively discontinuing older lines; while broader home ventilation demand is stable, the specific 'manufacturer has disappeared' pain point shrinks over time rather than grows.Martha Lillard - Wikipedia ↗
Marketplace + community features are technically standard, but the hard problem is supply: verified legacy respiratory technicians are vanishingly rare, and medical-device repair carries HIPAA/FDA regulatory burden plus liability around life-supporting equipment.