Manufacturing technology
Top tier robotics have an accuracy range of 0.001mm.
Despite this preponderance, however, it’d be wrong to imply that device production lines are perfect. Developed for specific products, stamps can’t simply be tweaked to new devices, which is hardly ideal in an age where flexibility and scalability are so important. More than that, traditional automation can sometimes be unreliable, with operators unable to spot faulty equipment before it breaks – a situation that naturally hurts both profit margins and patients themselves. Amid these concerns, it makes sense that manufacturers are increasingly embracing the immense power of robots, leaning on genuinely autonomous machines that can take an active role in crafting new devices. There are, of course, cost and training challenges here, to name but two. But get implementation right, and robots could eventually transform the sector just as radically as BD did back in the 1950s.
Fixed ideas
Automation and robotics are two manufacturing terms that are sometimes conflated. But as Dr Howie Choset warns, they’re fundamentally different ways of manufacturing. The former, the Carnegie Mellon University professor explains, encompasses stamp presses or welding stations, “fixed” technologies that can’t be reprogrammed. Carsten Heer, of the Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robotics, agrees. “Classic machine tools,” he says, “need much more time to adjust the change for the production of a special item – or are even unable to switch at all.” That’s a far cry from robots. Boasting malleable arms, which can quickly be given new digital commands, they’re far more versatile than
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traditional automated production lines, especially when they can be dismantled and reassembled elsewhere in a facility. As Heer says: “This flexibility allows companies to produce even small batch sizes for a broader number of customers in a very short time.” Nor are these merely theoretical benefits. In the US state of Minnesota, for instance, Tegra Medical doubled throughput after investing in a trio of manufacturing robots, freeing up 11 workers to focus on other tasks. With these strengths in mind, you might imagine that robots are invading factory floors wherever medical devices are made. Yet the statistics tell a different story. The UK, for example, boasts a mere 23,000 industrial robots, translating to just 101 for every 10,000 flesh-and-blood employees. And though that proportion is higher in more tech-savvy countries like Japan, you similarly get the impression that, as far as medical device manufacturing is concerned, this technological bounty is unbalanced. For if the giants of the sector are rushing ahead with their own robotic investments – twin-armed ‘YuMi’ robots have, for instance, supported manufacturing at Johnson & Johnson factories since 2015 – smaller firms have traditionally struggled to keep up. As Choset puts it: “Most medical devices are made with fixed automation – there really aren’t robots.” Economics has typically been one barrier here. Though prices have certainly dropped in general, the most complex manufacturing robots still cost around $400,000, while kitting out a whole warehouse could set a firm back as much as $4m. That dovetails with the cost of education. In one 2020 survey, 46% of UK workers stated that the financial burden of training prevented them from
Medical Device Developments /
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