In collaboration with the engineering team at Intellijoint Surgical in Ontario, Canada, a team of students and I helped redesign their hip surgery platform as to not be easily dislodged during the hip replacement procedure.

We based our design off a traditional drywall screw, modified for surgical purposes, that can be implanted and removed from the bone intuitively by surgeons. I was mainly responsible for the CAD and physical prototyping – we began with a comprehensive CAD model, moving on to large metal prototypes tested in wood, then using a combination of household and hardware materials to make an actual-scale model of the device.

We also used finite element analysis to gage the pull-out strength of the device on cortical bone in surgery.

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Currently, we’re focusing on performing additional pull-out tests on sawbone using an Instron testing machine. The IP is currently under the ownership of Intellijoint itself, but may become open to the public once the results of our experiments are published.