IP Requirements:

• Industry IP

Experience Requirements:

• Industrial Design
• Image acquisition and processing
• Human factors

Using sterilized medical devices is one of the key steps in preventing infection during medical procedures in operating rooms or other clinical settings. The hospital’s Sterilization Processing Department (SPD) is responsible for decontaminating, cleaning, and sterilizing reusable medical devices for various departments that perform medical procedures.  The SPD staff faces many challenges when cleaning/ inspecting, disinfecting/ monitoring, and sterilizing/verifying the processes used in reprocessing medical devices.  To ensure proper cleaning, disinfecting, or sterilizing, the procedures/methods, and equipment must be capable of identifying failures at critical steps to ensure control of biocontamination and cleanliness are caught prior to the final disinfecting or sterilization step before the device is redeployed to the OR. 

The increasing complexity of surgical instruments in the operating room or clinical setting has made the cleaning and disinfecting process more challenging. This complexity, coupled with the higher volume of instrumentation, necessitates the adoption of automated technologies in the SPD. Challenges such as low staffing or complex instruments pose an increasing challenge to this sterile reprocessing department. 

Currently, many visual or color inspection methods in the SPD can leave some uncertainty around levels of cleanliness and types of contaminants, which can have severe implications for patient safety.  Despite the number of checks and procedures, many of these steps remain manual and subjective, thereby prone to technician error. Automation is critical to a successful device reprocessing outcome.  

There are currently minimal technologies available within the SPD that might address the automation needs.     

This research project and proposal aim to indicate key failure points where cleaning, inspecting, or verifying methods fail and find a solution to automating these steps, tracking, and/or flagging failed instruments/ process. This can be based on one type of medical instrument, process (etc. washer/ disinfector, ultrasonics), or similar. It will need to identify the key area within the SPD that faces these challenges and identify an inventive solution to this challenge.