Under the cold and sterile light of an operating room, collaboration is key. Surgeons cut, watch, and advise. Residents and nurses hold, clean, and stitch. And, as technology develops, a new kind of participant lends a hand, too: robots.
Controlled remotely by surgeons, who are often in a separate room or even building, these machines enable greater precision while minimizing the invasiveness of certain procedures. But this setup can come at a cost—removed from the operating room, surgeons are less able to jump in should something go wrong.
The Swiss medical-device startup Distalmotion saw an opportunity to combine the best of robotic surgery with the advantages of close human oversight, by re-imagining the way the robots are built and bringing the surgeons back into the operating room. To get there, a team of our colleagues at McKinsey Design did a little re-imagining of their own.
Discovery
Designing a medical device is no easy task. Distalmotion worked on the technology behind their product for several years—rethinking machine-assisted surgery entirely—before approaching McKinsey Design. Even then, they assigned our team only a small part of the problem: how to design the surgeon’s ergonomic grips.
“It may sound straightforward, but for us the assignment raised many, many questions,” says Design Director Marcus Heneen. “To understand the grip, you must first understand the whole machine and the entire process. I think our subsequent conversations with Distalmotion showed our holistic thinking, and how we could offer expertise across the broader project.”
Distalmotion soon decided to bring our team on to help them think through the design for the entire system, and our colleagues got to work on the “discovery” part of their design process. By conducting interviews and on-site “fieldshops” with surgeons and nurses, they started to understand the full extent of the challenge.
“You can’t truly design something without being immersed in the users’ reality and experiences,” says Expert Partner Thomas Nilsson.
Design
The design challenge that emerged was a complex one: the robot had to outperform its competition in both precision and user-friendliness. But the team also had to create a surgeon’s console that could live in the operating room. That meant the precise controls used to guide the robot would either need to be detachable for sterilization or perform just as well when draped with sterile plastic sheets.
“There were nearly 100 sub-components that needed to be given function and form,” says Marcus. “And any screen, any handle, any joystick, any button, any moving part at all, all had to operate without any loss in function in this sterile environment.”
With the stakes so high, the joint team made the design phase of the project intensely collaborative, holding weekly sprints and regularly consulting surgeons and nurses to guide the design work. They built hundreds of full-scale prototypes—including grips, triggers, armrests, robotic arms, mechanical joints, and more—all of which were reviewed and iterated on again and again. Finally, the robot was ready for testing.
Deploy
Our colleagues at McKinsey Design, together with Distalmotion's R&D team, have determined the form and function of even the most minute details. Keeping with their iterative approach, Dexter is already out with experts to be tested on cadavers, says Marcus.
Dexter also has the attention of the design world: its unique approach to robotics has recently been awarded the 2020 iF Design Award.
If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to Marcus Heneen, Design Director or Thomas Nilsson, Partner, leader of Medtech Design and Innovation [email link]
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