Fusion Biotec is proud to offer a wide range of design capabilities for medical devices. With decades of personal experience, our engineering team understands what works and what doesn’t. Let’s use designing medical products with integrated consumables as an example. With the simple example of a peristaltic pump, it’s important to know how the tubing, its wall thickness and durometer effect pump performance. But with more complicated disposables such as a lab on a chip or diagnostic cassettes, the hardware / consumable interface becomes so interdependent that developing them separately is not advised. In our experience, the best design path starts with a system approach to the overall product. For a disposable cassette, it’s not good enough to design the product in one shop and hand it over to another to integrate in their hardware. Too often, the disposable is not proven out, constrained by its geometry or too early to be transferred. This is often misunderstood by the cassette designer and can be difficult or impossible for the hardware engineering firm to resolve. The solution is to work with pre-designed and pre-tested cassette features (pumping, filling, mixing, washing, thermal control, etc.) and to put early prototypes on test fixtures to prove functionality before involving the hardware developer. Better yet, if the hardware engineering firm is familiar with the test fixturing and has knowledge of the sub-systems involved then the development effort can be fast-tracked.
Tags:
disposables
system
integration
cassette
