Devroye

If you ever need a hair transplant, you’ll want this connected device. It’s safe and precise.

The client

Hair loss is something almost half of all people face at some point. Although the first transplant was performed about 8 decades ago, performing these surgeries is still a very delicate and labor-intensive process. Doctor Jean Devroye is an awarded expert in the field of hair transplantations, drawing on his extensive experience he conceptualized a significant improvement in the extraction process.

The challenge

Until recently there was no comprehensive tool that allowed a surgeon to safely extract hair follicles without damaging the collected hairs or leaving noticeable scars on the patient’s skin. Devroye’s system not only addresses these pain points, it also enables practitioners to enhance the success rate of their operations. We were tasked to develop a controller to improve the handling of the motor system used for these extractions.

The approach

Devroye suggested the idea of a hands-free controller, which resulted in our team landing on the concept of using a pedal early on. Which we combined with leveraging a mobile application for the pedal settings and a motor system by the Swiss company Nouvag.

By incorporating the motor system that was already used for the procedure in combination with a mobile application, functionality is added with a minimal increase in cost. Users can edit their pedal settings with one hand while keeping control of the motorized pen in the other hand.

Our design team got to work to ensure an intuitive interaction between the physical hardware and the digital application. While our electronics engineering team collaborated closely with Devroye Instruments to work on the prototyping. During this iteration, several features were optimized and a battery was added to enable to perform a whole surgery autonomously.

The solution

Accuracy and control are essential when performing follicular unit extraction surgery. This is where the pedal-controlled system stands out from its competitors. Users can control the acceleration speed of the motor by adding or releasing pressure on the foot pedal. In other words: a third hand. The mobile application offers control of the three main parameters: acceleration speed, oscillation and angulation of the punch.

This collaboration with Devroye Instruments resulted in a solution already being called the future standard of FUE surgery.

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