About EMR-TEK
I was three years old when I developed vitiligo.
By nine, it had spread across my face, neck, and most of my body.
My parents had taken me to twenty doctors across the US and Canada.
Every single one said the same thing: avoid sunlight. Wear sunscreen. Stay inside. Cover up.
That turned out to be almost exactly wrong.
My mom didn't stop looking. Before Google existed, she went to a library and found a German researcher, Dr. Karen Schallreuter, a PhD dermatologist in Berlin, who had been publishing research on a treatment nobody in North America was using.
A topical pseudocatalase cream that reduced the epidermal hydrogen peroxide interfering with my melanocytes. Then, after ten minutes, exposure to 311–312nm narrowband UVB Philips bulbs.
The cream didn't do it alone. The light didn't do it alone. The sequence was what worked.
Remove the biochemical interference first. Then apply the specific wavelength. In that order.
I was thirteen years old. Within six months it started working. Within a year I was repigmenting. By my mid-teens, most of my skin had come back, everywhere except my hands and feet, which the literature says is nearly impossible to repigment due to constant friction and chemical exposure.
They were right about that part. I was fourteen, printing PubMed studies in my basement and highlighting them. Not because I wanted to be a scientist, because I had watched my own body stop working, and then start working again, and I needed to understand why.
By eighteen I was studying photobiomodulation, endocrinology, and circadian biology. Not in a classroom. In my parents' house, in the evenings, because nobody around me was asking the same questions.
I tried things on myself. I made mistakes. I burned myself with the devices I grew up using — so I designed the devices I would have liked to have back then. That research and those mistakes, became EMR-TEK.
I've been running this company for over eight years. Every product we've built, I've used on myself first. Every protocol we publish, I've run personally.
I've made all the mistakes so our customers don't have to.
"If it's not good enough for me, it's not in our products. That's the only standard I know how to work to." — Kris Sweeting, Founder
Why EMR-TEK
Here's something the industry doesn't want you to know.
Most of the panels on the market are the same product. Same Chinese factory. Same circuit
board. Same actual specifications — regardless of what the marketing page claims.
Different logo. Different price tag, depending on how much the influencer deal cost.
I know because I looked at all of them before I built my first device.
Standard LED diode arrays scatter light. Wide emission angles. The irradiance — the actual photon density reaching your tissue — drops fast with distance.
Most panels that claim therapeutic dosing at six inches away can't deliver it when you actually measure it.
What's different inside every EMR-TEK device.
EMR-TEK uses COB (Chip-on-Board) technology: multiple diodes concentrated into a single
emitter, paired with a cone-shaped optical lens.
The result is dense, directed light that
maintains irradiance at the distances people actually use these devices.
At the panel face, EMR-TEK devices read ~14,500 mW/cm². Most competitors read ~200 mW/cm². That is not a✎
rounding error.
● Mean Well® industrial-grade power drivers — the same standard used in medical and industrial equipment. Not the generic knockoffs that cause flicker, voltage instability, and degraded output. Stable, measured, consistent.
● Philips 311–312nm narrowband UVB bulbs — the most clinically studied UV source in the world, present in virtually every phototherapy study published in the last 30 years.
Not generic UV diodes. The exact bulbs the research was done with.
● Zero flicker. Zero measurable magnetic field. Every device is tested before it ships.
● Independently verified irradiance data — not self-reported specs printed on a box.
● Granted patents — not pending applications. Patent examiners don't grant in heavily-examined categories without rigorous review.
Who's using it.
Ben Greenfield. Dr. Jack Kruse. Khloe Kardashian — who bought six devices for her family and posted about it publicly. The President of El Salvador. None of them were paid. There was no PR agency. They used the products and said so.
That's the kind of proof you can't manufacture.
What we're not.
We're not a wellness brand. We don't use the word "holistic." We don't sell you a lifestyle or a morning ritual.
We build devices engineered to a specific technical standard — for people who have done their homework and want something that actually performs.
If you check specs, ask for irradiance data, and aren't satisfied with vague claims and good product photography — this is what we built for you.
"I'm not trying to build the biggest light therapy company. I'm trying to build
the best one. Those aren't the same thing." — Kris