Background: Drill availability is a major limitation in developing countries, where surgeons turn to using manual hand-crank drills to perform surgeries.  A common hardware drill equipped with a waterproof, sterilizable fabric cover provides a cost-effective solution in the operating room.

Objective: Develop, conduct, and analyze a study to quantify the drilling performance of the drill cover solution and compare it against a commercial surgical drill and a manual hand-crank drill.

Abstract: Surgical Device Innovation for Low-Resource Settings: An Alternative for Bone Drilling

Company: Arbutus Medical

The Drill Cover Solution

From the Arbutus Medical product page:

The DrillCover Hex is a sterilizable and reusable fully-sealed barrier that transforms a hardware drill into surgical grade drill. Our kit includes a drill and cover to provide the precision, sterility, and adaptability needed in low-resource settings.

Detailed view of the drill cover.

The User Study

Owing to limited access to surgical power drills, orthopedic surgeons in low-resource settings commonly use manual drills or nonsterile hardware drills. We propose the use of a drill cover solution: a sterilizable fabric bag plus sealed surgical chuck adaptor to permit the safe use of hardware drills for orthopedic surgery. The purpose of this study was to compare the drilling performance of covered hardware drills with manual drills and standard surgical power drills.

From left to right: commercial surgical drill, drill cover solution, manual hand-crank drill.

Operation of the test apparatus.

Method to easily measure the plunge depth through the surrogate bone. The platform moves down as the drill bit pushes against it. The calipers measure the resulting depth.

Stamping method to consistently mark targets for the drilling tests

Comparison of hole quality. A well drilled hole face (left) compared to two holes drilled off axis (right).

Test apparatus, modeled in SolidWorks.

Product photos by Masashi Karasawa