Two PHD students from the University of Toronto have just been named as the national winners for the James Dyson Award. The project Robert Brooks and Justin Wee submitted is called ForceFilm. It’s a patent-pending thin surgical instrument add-on that accurately measures the forces exerted on tissue from minimally invasive surgery, a procedure that has supposedly been on the rise because of less surgical issues associated with it. Brooks and Wee designed ForceFilm to retrofit any standard rigid MIS instrument. The forces that the film detects will be wirelessly sent to the surgeon so he or she gets live force feedback that will let him or her know if dangerous levels of forces are close. The two have been award $3,400 for the win.
They will be heading into the next stage of the James Dyson Award, where a panel of Dyson engineers will shortlist 20 projects from the 23 participating countries. The two are joined by four other teams with three of them also working on medical devices and one an athletic equipment add-on.