Progress Report 3/27
Progress was made this week in refining the second mechanical design we presented previously before leaving campus. There were several key faults which we identified and sought to improve upon. First, the adapter between the control mechanism and insertion tube was too large to fit the insertion tube. This was easily fixed by scaling down the size of the hole that the tube fitted into. However, the adapter had a much more complicated wire management issue to be fixed. The old interface between the insertion tube wires and control gear caused large amounts of slippage and limited the design’s range of motion. To alleviate these problems a new wire guidance system was designed into the adapter.
We have also developed a critical marketing pathway for our device. This path represents the minimal steps needed to expose our product to the market space and have it integrated into low resource environments. We are currently completing our device development and assessing any risk areas in the device design. The marketing plan in its entirety is laid out below.
Critical Marketing Pathway
- Concept & Feasibility
- Device Development
- Clinical Validation
- Regulatory Approvals – FDA approval
- WHO Evaluation – results in WHO endorsement
- Country Transition to Scale (Pre-Launch) – Civil society engagement, cost analysis and procurement, distribution plan, training
- Country Adoption – procurement for widespread use