Meet Liron Meltser: 20+ years of myofunctional therapy, now shaping Liper

If you've ever wondered who decides whether a small change to the TongueGym is worth making — a tip angle, a packaging choice, a phrase in the manual — most of the time, the answer is Liron Meltser.

And the reason her opinion matters is that she's spent the last twenty years working with the people on the other end of those decisions: infants with feeding difficulties, children with speech and breathing patterns that need retraining, adults navigating sleep-disordered breathing. She's not an executive who occasionally consults clinicians. She is a clinician — and the products she helps shape are ones she'd put in her own patients' hands.

The clinical CV

Liron is a Speech-Language Pathologist with a B.A. and M.A. in Communication Disorders, and 20+ years of practice. Her specialism is the overlap between two adjacent fields that most parents have never heard of:

• Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy (OMT) — the retraining of the muscles around the mouth, tongue, and face so they sit and move efficiently. The same kind of work that's increasingly used for sleep apnea, snoring, tongue-thrust patterns, and post-orthodontic stability in adults, and for feeding and speech development in children.
• Buteyko breathing therapy — a structured method for retraining functional breathing patterns, used clinically for asthma, sleep, anxiety-driven over-breathing, and athletic performance. Liron is a Master Instructor of the Buteyko International Clinic — the sole certifying authority for Buteyko practitioners in Israel.

Day to day, that translates into a patient list that's unusually broad: developmental delay, oral myofunctional disorders, breathing difficulties, reduced speech intelligibility, childhood apraxia of speech, adults with dysfunctional breathing patterns. She directs a therapeutic centre dedicated to OMT, lectures and mentors other clinicians, and identifies tongue-tie in infants, children, and adults — the same condition that started TongueGym's story.

Why this matters for a product, not just a clinic

Most consumer products in this space are designed by industrial designers and approved by clinicians. The trade-off shows up in subtle places: a tip that's elegant but the wrong shape for a baby's anatomy, packaging that looks great but doesn't survive a busy parent's morning, instructions that assume the user already knows what "tongue posture" means.

The opposite path — clinician-designed, then refined for usability — is rarer, but it produces a different kind of product. The TongueGym's double-tipped head, the under-tongue contour, the choice of a slip-on form factor instead of a handle — these started as clinical decisions, not aesthetic ones. Liron's day job is exactly what's needed to make sure they stay that way as the product evolves.

A natural fit, not a corporate one

It's worth saying the obvious thing about the timing: Liper and the TongueGym are now owned and operated by Meltser Sky LTD. Liron and the company share a surname for a reason — this is a family-led continuation of work that started in a clinic and is now both a clinical practice and a business. The same person who spends mornings with patients also weighs in on what the product manual should say, what the next generation of packaging should feel like, and where TongueGym belongs in a clinician's toolkit.

That overlap is the point. Products in healthcare-adjacent categories usually drift toward marketing over time — louder claims, lower clinical rigour. Having someone like Liron on the inside, with twenty years of patient hours behind her and a reputation among Israeli OMT practitioners she'd never put at risk for a sales line, is the most reliable insurance against that drift.

What's next

The roadmap Liron is actively shaping focuses on three things:

• Clearer guidance for adults. Most TongueGym customers today are parents working with infants and children. Adult use — myofunctional therapy, snoring, swallowing patterns — has just as much evidence behind it but less awareness. Expect more education content, more therapist partnerships, and routines built specifically for adult workflows.
• Tighter clinician integration. The product already lives in dental clinics, lactation practices, and speech-therapy offices across more than 40 countries. The next step is making it dramatically easier for clinicians to prescribe it as part of a structured regimen, with materials they can share with their patients.
• The next generation of TongueGym. The current device is the result of years of iteration. The next version is already in progress — quietly — with Liron leading the clinical review.

You'll hear more from her here over the coming months — practical "TG Time" guides, breathing exercises, clinician-to-parent explanations of why certain routines work. If there's a question you'd like answered, write to us at main@liper-device.com with "For Liron" in the subject — we genuinely send those along.