Boston Children’s Hospital - Cutting and Cauterizing Pen
The Quick Trigger team at Boston Children’s Hospital identified an opportunity to develop a single-use combined cautery tip and fluid suction device with a retractable fluid suction tip.
This combination tissue cutting and cauterizing device improves a surgeon’s efficiency during open surgery, and reduces the need for multiple single use devices in the OR.
Being the first of its kind blade and suction combination tool required the industrial design team to explore options for blade and suction tube layout and spacing. The team had to ensure both cutting and suction functions were equal to or better than the two individual predicate devices.
The mechanical team in collaboration with the electrical team developed a method for deploying and retracting the suction tube using the negative pressure supplied to the device via the existing suction system currently used in the OR suite.
Nonfunctional to scale usability mockups were evaluated by the internal team and surgeons to assess button placement, overall size and grip, and the layout of the cutting blade and suction tube.
The cautery tip uses standard modular cautery tips and remain fixed in space, while the suction tube will retract and deploy as the surgeon needs through a simple and intuitive button interface.
