Project Description:

Surgical procedures routinely require retractors to expose soft tissues in the operating space. Throughout any given surgery, dozens of small adjustments are made to the retractor’s position to optimize exposure as the case progresses. This is manually done by surgical assistants, medical students, and/or residents, limiting their availability to help perform surgical tasks. In many practice settings, there are limited staff scrubbed into a case to aid with retraction, thus potentially impairing surgeons’ visibility of the surgical field, efficiency, and possibly patient safety.

There are retractor arms on the market which clamp to the OR table and can be adjusted; however, they are cumbersome and require two hands to operate (to loosen, reposition, and then tighten the arms). On average, these predicate devices can take up to 2 minutes per adjustment, with adjustments occurring around every 10 minutes. With around 4-5 million ENT surgeries occurring in the US per year, this amounts to hundreds of thousands of lost hours due to procedural inefficiency. Thus, there is a need for a rapidly adjustable, low-profile surgical retractor arm that can be repositioned with one hand in a smooth, ergonomic motion.

The RapidReach Arm is designed to address this clinical need. This device utilizes two ball & socket joints that provides a full range of motion for the surgical retractors with a novel pin locking mechanism that can lock its position with a simple thumb motion. This device reduces the adjustment time of surgical retractors by 88% and is light enough to be easily repositioned using one hand. With the RapidReach arm, surgeons would be less reliant on a surgical assistant to hold and reposition the retractor, thus freeing the assistant up to perform other critical tasks during surgery. This technology would increase operational efficiency and has the potential to revolutionize surgical retraction.