This report describes the development process of the pintracker, a product able to prevent and detect pin tract infections for external fixators.
The pintracker is designed in the context of the knee reviver, a medical device able to distract the knee joint. Knee joint distraction is a treatment method of osteoarthritis in the knee joint aiming at retention of the joint.
Knee joint distraction is an alternative treatment to total knee arthroplasty for young patients. Currently, total knee arthroplasty is the golden standard in treatment of osteoarthritis. For young osteoarthritis patients, implantation of knee prosthesis at young age, would implicate revision knee surgery at older age. Knee revision surgery is involved with complications, infections and low success rates. Knee joint distraction aims at retention of the knee joint to prevent knee revision surgery at older age.
The high infection rates involved with the use of external fixator pins is a significant limiting factor in knee joint distraction being adopting as viable treatment method for treating young arthritis patients.
Prior research within the UMC Groningen (Van der Borden et. al, 2004, 2005, 2007) showed that subjecting the bone pins of external fixators to an electric current reduces the development of pin tract infections at the pin sites significantly.
UMC Utrecht is continuing this research by applying the methods of infection prevention to the knee reviver. Pending animal studies should show the effect of applying a current to the bone pins of external fixators. The next step in this research is applying the methods in a product which can be used for infection prevention in human studies.
The result of this design process involves the design of a product which can be used for human trials. The device is able to store data on the resistance of the bone pins. Possibly, a correlation between infection development and resistance between the bone pins is found.
When present, the correlation can serve as means to detect infection development in an early stage. A product design is made of a product which can be produced in series. Detection of infection development is taken into account of a series product.
The product casing has been prototyped through iterative steps to increase the feasibility of the design.
In long term, the method can be applied to all external fixator pins. A conceptual design is proposed of a method to make the treatment method applicable to all external fixator pins. The added value of embedding an app with the pintracker has been described and the app is visualized.