The same job, shift after shift
Cutting bandages, pads and sterilization paper in hospitals is routine but tedious work. Material delivered in the morning is cut one piece at a time with scissors by hand. Three problems occur at the same time during this:
- Inconsistency: The same material is cut to different dimensions by two different people.
- Accident risk: Cuts and injuries on the hand.
- Time: Cutting, preparing the pages and distributing them takes hours of the day.
Idea for a solution: not a machine, but "modes"
Many products ask the user to enter width, length and quantity. This is not the right approach, because almost nobody knows these values.
I designed the machine around modes. The user selects what they want to do, and the machine fills in the necessary parameters:
- Pediatric emergency IV
- Adult emergency IV
- Wound / pressure sore
- Operating theatre / general use
- Sterilization paper
- Medical bandage
- Leech pad
- Glove cutting
- Custom mode
Mechanism: why a guillotine?
Instead of moving the scalpel mechanism left and right, I chose to move it from top to bottom. A guillotine movement applies the same cutting force no matter how thin the material is; horizontal movement leads to slipping and irregular cuts on thin material.
Because the blade fully descends during the cut, there is also no risk of the material escaping.
Electronics
- Arduino Mega 2560 main control
- 240×240 color TFT LCD — touch interface
- Material feeding with a stepper motor + TB6600
- Position verification with a Hall sensor
- 12 V MOSFET safety switching: the motor does not run until the sensor confirms the correct position
What happens when the blade dulls?
A dulled blade does not cut, it squeezes. To prevent this, the blade was made replaceable. The spare part set includes the blade, sensor and bearings together; the user can change it themselves in 5 minutes.
Result
The machine went into production able to handle the hospital's daily cutting load. The need for manual cutting disappeared, the product became standardised and patient satisfaction increased in a measurable way.
