Our Innovative Hair Transplant tool!

Why Ailesbury Hair Clinic developed it’s own hair transplant tool?

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Ailesbury Hair Clinic, based in Dublin, Ireland, has seen a 50 per cent increase in people coming forward for hair replacement treatments. When the clinic couldn’t find a next level surgical tool to harvest hair follicles for treatments, it decided to design its own and turned to precision drive and motor specialist, maxon for help.

Who is affected by hair loss?

Hair loss affects millions of men and women globally and many of these saw the chance to have treatment and recover while working from home as a convenient opportunity. Ailesbury Hair Clinic, which specialises in the minimally invasive aesthetic hair integration follicle unit extraction (AHI FUE) procedure and has won numerous awards for its advanced technique, saw a huge increase in demand for treatment. Most existing follicle extraction devices are heavy and bulky, so the clinic’s experts decided to call on their 20 years industry experience to design a new device for themselves. Having been involved in developing various medical devices and surgical tools over the years, the clinic’s experts were confident they could design a more streamlined and effective hand-held follicle extraction device that was light, robust, fast and had wireless capabilities.

What was the solution to the new hair transplant tool?

Ioannis Ypatidis, a programmer and roboticist, is the Project Manager who developed the new device. He chose maxon’s products for the final design because of their small size and relatively high torque compared to similar options available from other manufacturers. After initially deciding to go with a geared motor for their device, the team contacted Martin Leahy, maxon’s Sales Engineer in Ireland, to discuss concerns about noise and vibration. “Martin directed us towards choosing a direct drive motor without gears because this would eliminate the issues around noise and vibration while increasing the product’s service life,” explained Ioannis. “His advice was extremely valuable and saved us a lot of time on this project. “We were going in the wrong direction with our motor choice and consulting Martin allowed us to adapt without wasting a lot of unnecessary time and resources in testing the wrong solutions.” The innovative new drill is exact, reliable and extremely small, the nose is just 0.8 mm. The motor is from maxon’s configurable DCX direct drive range which facilitates the handheld design by offering high power density and torque in a small design. Using a direct drive solution increased the device’s service life and offered a reduction in weight and vibration compared to geared motor solutions. Using a rechargeable battery system has made the new tool portable and transferable from clinic to clinic and country to country without considering different power supplies. “People are more comfortable now with this type of hair restoration treatment. It is considered quite mainstream and is a fairly simple and acceptable procedure. Depending on how many hairs are grafted, it usually takes approximately 3 to 4 hours of treatment, with breaks. The maxon motor within the tool is powerful and extremely efficient, providing the user with better scope for precision, power and perfection in client results,” added Ioannis. Read on Engineers Ireland or download the article here Made In Ireland January 2022 (mydigitalpublication.co.uk)