Helen, what a fantastic idea to turn your artefact into a commercial! I think it was very astute to play on people’s fear of being unwell in order to go for the hard sell. In the UK it is sometimes easy to forget that health care is big business and I suspect if you were to sell a product like this your biggest customers would not be people scared of being ill; the best customers would be the drug companies trying to keep any product affecting their profits off the market.
Amazon did something similar by buying out the company which developed the robotic technology for use in their warehouse and thereby taking the competitive edge in online shipping. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/how-amazon-triggered-a-robot-arms-race
Thanks for providing this unique perspective.