Medtech concepts are a dime a dozen in Australia. But to overcome our health care challenges, innovations must be manufacture-ready.
Australia’s population is rapidly ageing at a rate that will require us to build 375 acute hospital beds every month for the next 15 years just to keep up with demand.
A shift in approach is therefore needed to manage the health care needs of Australia’s changing demographic, said Professor Sharath Sriram, co-leader of the Functional Materials and Microsystems team at RMIT’s School of Engineering.
At the same time, personalised health care data has become increasingly popular, providing more specific health insights for individuals. “People are now fascinated with wearing smartwatches and tracking their health data through apps,” Sriram said.
This shift toward individualised data enables more appropriate diagnosis and treatment.
“In traditional health care, a lot of data is based on statistics from a small subset, which is also often not gender-specific. But assistive technologies can empower people to stay healthy and improve their quality of life.”
These technologies can be used to prevent health care issues, such as heart attacks and heart failure.
“When someone has a heart attack, they’re taken to the hospital for a blood test to detect biomarkers,” Sriram said. “But if we can track these biomarkers at regular intervals in a minimally invasive way, we could warn the individual early, preventing the heart attack before it happens.”
This technology could also prove critical in aged care, where infections are a leading cause of hospitalisation and decreased life expectancy.
“Non-invasive monitoring can track whether an older person is sleeping well, is at risk of falls, or is developing an infection,” he said. “This is particularly important in women, where there’s a correlation between urinary tract infections and dementia.”
Strengthening Australia’s medtech capability
Australia’s strong health care research sector provides a solid foundation for medical device innovation, with engineers increasingly collaborating with clinicians to develop solutions to health care challenges.
Another Australian strong suit is clinical trials. “Many international companies come to Australia to conduct clinical trials because of our strong track record,” Sriram said. However, manufacturing remains the missing piece of the puzzle, with start-ups struggling with proof of concept.
To address this gap, RMIT launched the Discovery to Device advanced manufacturing facility, bringing together entrepreneurs, start-ups, manufacturers and researchers to develop innovative medical technologies for health care and diagnostics.
As the first ISO-accredited prototyping complex in the Asia-Pacific, it will support the rapid development of wearable and flexible medical technologies, while adhering to the ISO 13485 standard for medical device design and production.
“We’ll never replace large-scale manufacturers in Australia or China,” said Sriram, who is the director of the facility. “But it helps start-ups produce small batches to support trials and mature their products before scaling up.”
For one start-up developing a wearable biometric patch, researchers at the state-of-the-art facility were able to develop the concept, prove it, and make the devices at small volume.
“If they go straight to a manufacturer, the minimum order would be 20,000 units,” he said. “But as a startup, going from 30 to 20,000 is not realistic. If the design doesn’t work, they will lose [those] units.”
RMIT’s facility was able to produce 2000 units per week, allowing the start-up to validate its design before moving to mass production.
Concept to Products
RMIT can also fine-tune a design in accordance with manufacturing principles, such as REMi, a world-first smart monitoring system.
This idea was first conceived by founders of a start-up in the sleep tech space with backgrounds in the bedding and mattress industries, who sought to revolutionise sleep with smart beds – initially by embedding sensors into mattresses.
“That’s where structured engineering thinking comes in, including considering whether the sensors should be put in a mattress itself, which would entail replacement and present a barrier to use and manufacturing,” Sriram said.
Within a couple of meetings, the idea was transformed to a smart mattress protector, with RMIT also helping the start-up to write grant proposals, through which they secured a $1.7 million Federal government grant over three years.
Two-and-a-half years later, the concept evolved into a commercial product, launched by Victorian MP Karen Andrews, that uses soft electronics to transmit real-time sleep data to the cloud, viewable on a dashboard.
Incorporating advanced technology into bedding posed a challenge, requiring innovations like screen printing to make the product commercially viable.
“We had to change it into screen printing, similar to t-shirts,” he said. “You have to be very responsive to the industry and manufacturing needs to make a commercialisable product.”
Scaling up research
RMIT’s pilot facility has also been instrumental in small-scale production for trials, including a patch developed by a Sydney-based company for post-operative care or with dementia in aged care settings. The technology was trialled with National Health System partners in the UK, with RMIT making samples sent overseas for the 30-person pilot.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses in aged care facilities were required to monitor residents’ temperature, blood oxygen and heart rate variability three times per day.
“Because this was done manually, it took them around seven minutes per resident, three times daily,” Sriram said. “If the resident had dementia, it could take 20 minutes, including settling them down and going through the process.”
The patch used in the trial was battery free, working via near-field communication, and was capable of collecting the same biometric data at an average of 10 seconds – with no manual entry required.
“We did a miniature scale up for them, where we made patches for a 300-person trial, and will [eventually] scale up to 2000,” he said.
To create comprehensive solutions that are manufacture-ready, the facility brings together expertise from RMIT’s multiple engineering disciplines – electronics, materials science, biomedical, and manufacturing.
“About a quarter of the work we do is in collaboration with design schools to ensure devices are both functional and user-friendly,” Sriram added.