"Until just yesterday, we were doing bubble-blowing training together, and then I heard that the elder had suddenly passed away. I felt deep regret, thinking that if the disease had been found early, it wouldn't have come to this. That led me to create a respiratory disease screening device."
TR is a startup that develops and sells a respiratory disease screening device based on artificial intelligence (AI) called "The Spirokit." CEO Kim Byeong-soo founded the company in Jan. 2020, drawing on experience assisting patient care as a physical therapist at a tertiary general hospital.
Kim focused on the fact that initial assessment, triage, and testing for respiratory diseases are not easy. Because most primary care clinics are opened by general practitioners or gastroenterologists, patients who visit for respiratory symptoms were having difficulty getting an accurate diagnosis.
He said, "Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have similar symptoms, but their causes and treatments are different," and noted, "If you are not a pulmonologist, it can be difficult to comprehensively interpret pulmonary function test results."
The Spirokit is a medical device that provides analysis assistance based on pulmonary function test data. When a patient repeats breathing by following the test-guidance software, the measured data are stored on a server, then organized and visualized with reference to clinical guidelines and provided as reference information to assist clinicians' judgment.
However, Kim emphasized, "The Spirokit is not a device that replaces clinicians' diagnoses, but a screening and analysis assistance tool that helps check pulmonary function test results more intuitively," adding, "The final diagnosis and treatment decisions are made at the discretion of the clinical staff."
To that end, Kim worked with Chungnam National University Hospital on a research project from 2021 to 2022 and secured 30,000 cases of data. The sensor calibration function is a technology that automatically adjusts air volume according to temperature, atmospheric pressure, and humidity to improve accuracy.
TR supplied products to 361 medical institutions by the first half of 2025. In 2023, it obtained medical device approval including the analysis-assistance software function, and it is expanding its supply chain to primary care institutions, general hospitals, and university hospitals through pharmaceutical sales representatives, contract sales organizations (CSO), and distributors.
Given the limited domestic market, it is also pursuing overseas expansion in parallel. In 2023, it partnered with HITACHI to enter the Japanese market, and in 2025 it signed export contracts for Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Indonesia with Seegene Medical Foundation, FPT, and APM, respectively.
Kim estimates the respiratory disease screening market at 34.5 trillion won. Of that, the domestic market related to respiratory care is 111.9 billion won. As of 2023, there were a total of 48,000 medical institutions in Korea, and only 6,339 had pulmonary function testing equipment. In particular, just 1,848 institutions were properly performing pulmonary function tests, or 4.5% of the total.
Kim expects demand for respiratory disease screening devices to grow further. He said, "There are still not many medical institutions that properly perform pulmonary function tests, so there is significant room for growth," and added, "There is a possibility that pulmonary function testing will be included in employee health checkups and discussions on improving reimbursement are underway, so related demand will increase even more."
※ This interview is not a medical device advertisement.