Adept - Design that Matters
When Auckland plastics manufacturer Murray Fenton was approached to develop a life-saving medical device he applied not only the high-tech tools at his disposal but some very simple ones as well, along with all his experience and intuition.
The issue
The administration of medicines and rehydration fluids by intravenous infusion (IV) is a common medical procedure employed worldwide. In first-world hospitals, microprocessor-controlled syringe pumps, which cost at least US$2,000, are used to ensure safe and accurate drug delivery.
In the developing world, however, a 50-cent plastic roller clamp is typically used to control IV flow rates. These clamps have no markings to permit flow rates to be accurately set or reproducibly controlled or even to indicate if the clamp is open or shut. Its highly sensitive adjustment mechanism mean that even trained medical staff have difficulty setting and maintaining accurate and safe infusion rates. When administering potent drugs such as anaesthetics or HIV and chemotherapy drugs, a 3mm (the width of the ‘m’ on this page) movement of the roller clamp may be the difference between life and death. Children have such limited tolerances, it is almost impossible to accurately control low IV infusion rates required to safely treat them.
In the developing world, particularly in crisis situations, patients are commonly left to treat themselves, often with fatal results. Roller clamps ‘creep’, resulting in highly variable flow rates over time, and movement of the patient or IV line can change the roller clamp setting resulting in under- or over-administration of fluids.
This is a big problem – about 2.5 billion IV sets are used in the developing world every year.
A few years ago, an American not-for-profit organisation Design that Matters (DtM) studied the problem and decided to do something about it. DtM is a collaborative network of volunteers in academia and industry who donate their skills and expertise to create breakthrough solutions for communities in need. They approached Auckland inventor Ray Avery with some ideas and asked if he could turn them into reality.
Ray knows a thing or two about using appropriate technology to solve third world problems: he is the founder of Medicine Mondiale, an independent development organisation that provides medicines and equipment for those in need. He worked with humanitarian eye specialist Fred Hollow, and set up factories in Eritrea and Nepal to produce cost-effective Perspex lenses for the sight-impaired – factories which today make 10% of the world’s supply of artificial lenses and return healthy profits used for blindness prevention.
Ray approached Adept Medical, a spin-off company of specialist plastics-forming company Adept Ltd based in Auckland. Founded originally as a custom injection moulder, Adept has evolved into a turnkey solutions provider with a fully-fledged design house, tooling shop, and production capabilities. The company is headed by Murray Fenton.
Ray explained that a simple rugged device was required that could be used by relatively untrained operators to control flows of IV fluids with greater accuracy than the conventional roller clips. DtM had proposed a solution for development, but Murray could see immediately that, for a variety of reasons, it wouldn’t deliver the fine control they wanted. The issue intrigued him. Given that the device had the potential to save millions of lives throughout the developing world, he agreed to develop the controller free of charge.
