From Garage Prototype to 6,000 Saves: How Entrepreneur Arthur Lih Built LifeVac

Arthur Lih’s phone buzzes while he’s mid-sentence, and he pauses to look. He reads the latest one aloud: An eight-month-old was choking on a piece of pizza crust. Back blows didn’t work. On the third pull of his device, the baby finally cried out and threw up the obstruction. “As we’re sitting here,” Lih said, “this little pizza-eating eight-month-old got saved.”

For Lih, the alert is a reminder of building something that works: a steady drip of strangers’ children who are saved, arriving as text messages while you sit for an interview. LifeVac, the anti-choking device Lih invented in his garage, has now been credited with over 6,000 saves across 30 countries. Last month, after a two-and-a-half-year review, it became the only device of its kind recommended by the FDA.

Lih says he never intended to do any of it. In fact, it all started with a sentence Lih couldn’t shake. Thirteen years ago, he was keeping a friend company at a hospital while the man’s mother had a procedure. “The last time I was here,” Lih recalled him saying, “there was a seven-year-old dead on that gurney right there.”

Lih asked what happened. The child had choked, his friend told him. Lih’s daughter, Jackie, was also seven at the time. “It really hit me,” he said, “I’m not having that happen to my daughter.”

“I’ve got to figure this out.”

Never Slowing Down

Lih is an unlikely entrepreneur. He’d built a freight company to retire early. The plan was to relax. “That lasted about three months, and then I had to go change the world,” he joked.

Lih set out in his garage, working on different ways of creating a novel anti-choking device from bits and bots he had around him. Through extreme amounts of trial and error, he created the prototype version of LifeVac – a plunger, a valve, a mask. But he knew nothing about injection molding, scaling production or FDA authorization. Every reason to quit was lined up and waiting.

He ignored them all. “I just never bothered with all the things they told me I couldn’t do. I just did them.”

A breakthrough came when the device worked on a donated CPR dummy, removing an errant olive pit that a child had stuffed into the device - for Lih, it was a sign from above. “It wouldn’t hold up in a medical journal,” Lih said. “But heart and soul, it told me: that’s what it’s supposed to do.”

Then came “the hardest sales job in the world,” offering a lifesaving device that hasn’t yet saved a life, and a credibility problem, he said. “They’d ask: ‘You’re a doctor?’ No, I’m a truck driver. That doesn’t help.” But a handful of customers believed, and LifeVac was out there. Soon, a text arrived from a colleague in the U.K.: Call me. We saved our first life.

A 4,000-Page Gauntlet

LifeVac was a Class II device, registered but never formally proven by the FDA. Then the knockoffs came. Lih reported them, but he couldn’t sue them from the U.S. The flood of cheap imitations is what finally pushed the regulators to act - not to shut LifeVac down, but to raise the bar. The FDA asked Lih to submit LifeVac for a de novo review: the process used when a product is so new they invent an entire classification for it. Because there’s no template, the first company has to build the road.

” every form of testing you can imagine,” Lih said. “Packaging, labeling, the words, the mask fit, the pressure... Simulations where they bring in random people off the street, hand them the instructions, and watch where they fail.” Four thousand pages of documentation later, LifeVac was cleared - it’s the only anti-choking device with FDA authorization.

A Life-Saving Network

The devices global footprint grew out of the same shipping network Lih was an expert in. The people running LifeVac Canada and the U.K. operation are old freight contacts.

The save count tells the story of sustained growth. “Zero the first year. Zero the second year. Then six. Then 15, then 37, then 57.” This year, Lih says, they’ll clear 2,000 – more saves in a single day now than in the first three years combined. Texas has made the device mandatory in schools. More than 10,000 schools have one. Every Costco now keeps a LifeVac next to its defibrillator. Lih still wants more – the device in schools everywhere. “It’s not like I’m searching for a cure that might exist someday,” he said. “It’s existed for a decade.”

A Legacy

When Lih is asked what he gets out of all this, he doesn’t reach for the save count or the FDA letter. It’s the entrepreneurial nature of it; a father and child standing somewhere, looking at the LifeVac. “That guy was in his garage, didn’t know anything, and changed the entire world,” he imagines. “You could do that. I heard he was a truck driver.”

That, Lih says, is the crux of it all. “Take away the excuse - that you’ve got to be a medical guy, a brain surgeon. Some guy went into his garage, didn’t know anything about it, and changed the world.”

“I didn’t want to live not trying.”