Industrial - Honours

modClave: Store & Sterilise

trophy Awarded

The modClave is a module-based steam sterilisation desktop appliance that enables small to medium-sized private medical practices to reprocess reusable metalware instruments such as scissors, tweezers and forceps. This product solves pain points discovered in the research phase where traditional autoclaves are often too expensive for clinics with the rise of western wages and the cost of commercial space. These pressures have led many clinics to increase their reliance on single-use instruments that are often hardly used before they have to be thrown away.

Isaac Bonora

the problem

Close-up of used surgical scissors filling the entire frame, stacked.

Second largest contributor to landfill

It is ironic that as we create a healthcare system to continually better the health of its population, we also have created a society with which the same system now contributes the second largest amount of waste to landfill, rivalling the food industry. This wasteful machine results from years of stigma and legislative reform stemming from the AIDS epidemic of the 80s. Today, the attitudes within medical practices highly reward the excessive packaging and over-discarding of medical devices. Single-use medical devices have become a favoured instrument by many practices, big and small, due partly to their short-term economic savings and thought to be “less hassle” by medical staff.

Procedure packs & Standardisation = Excess Waste

Medical waste is not the result of a singular issue. It is a complex tree of influences, including regulation, policy, tradition and human biases informing each other. For example, it was found in the literature review that the medical industry had trended away from the practice of sterilising medical devices for reuse in favour of a simpler pay-per-use model founded on the extensive use of single-use medical devices. This model has become standard in much of the west as there have been concerns regarding costs and liability with reusable device reprocessing.

Everything’s packed in one size. And so if you need, 10 centimetres of a bandage, but it’s a meter long, then you’re going to have to throw out the rest.

Private practice participant, describing their experience with standardisation with procedure packs.

current system map

The current system from the research revealed a linear process starting with manufacturing and freight. Where after healthcare, it is quickly incinerated and thrown into a landfill.

This system highlights the macro issues of the current system, where instruments are often shipped in from overseas consuming fossil fuels to only be burnt and thrown away, often after cutting a bandage.

Read more research here

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Research Paper
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application
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modclave

The modClave, is a module-based steam sterilisation desktop appliance that enables small to medium-sized private practices to reprocess reusable metalware instruments such as scissors, tweezers and forceps. This product solves pain points discovered in the research phase where traditional autoclaves are often too expensive for clinics with the rise of western wages and the cost of commercial space. These pressures have led most clinics to increase their reliance on single-use instruments that are often hardly used before they have to be thrown away in a landfill.

The modClave is a two-part system where the module contains the instruments for sterilisation and storage, and the desktop unit generates the required resources, such as steam, to achieve complete sterility.

features

Module

The modClave contains 3 modules used to store your instruments for long-term storage and sterilisation. The modules are a direct replacement for single-use procedure packs. Through the user of IoT devices, sensors, the module is able to track the sterility of its contents over time and display relevant information to the user through the use of the screen at the front of the module.

Desktop Unit

The desktop unit of the modClave is the brains of the operation. The unit itself is what provides the necessary resources to each module, such as steam and power, to reach the temperatures and pressures set forth by medical regulators. To maintain the highest quality, the desktop unit aggregates data from each module as they are reprocessed, monitoring sensors for any discrepancies in the cleaning cycle.

Sterilisation as a Service

The autoClave’s success with small to medium-sized clinics, which are often constrained by financial factors, lies within the business model the autoClave has accepted. Sterilisation as a service (SaaS) has been preferred for the modClave so that clinics may lease the product on term contracts, ensuring that anyone who wants a modClave can use one without the burden of high upfront costs associated with complex medical devices. From the service perspective, a health clinic may lease as many devices as they require, and the provider will outline a service-level agreement (SLA) that offers continual support. Thanks to the advancements in technology found within the modClave, the provider can remotely monitor each modClave, where reports and diagnostics information may be analysed so that preemptive and swift reactionary support may be applied, ensuring the reliable uptime of a single modClave.

new system

Compared to our old system that flowed left to right, we can see that the new system with the modClave enables a closed loop, where healthcare and sterilisation may be in harmony with each other. We are reducing complexity and waste.

Isaac Bonora

Isaac Bonora is an Industrial designer, programmer and photographer based in Brisbane, Australia. As he finishes up Industrial Design at QUT, he has become increasingly interested in tangible design that solves human problems.