Scaling Up Medical Device Testing System Capabilities While Significantly Decreasing Testing Time
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- Solution: Specialized software expertise targeted time-consuming test operation elements, re-writing the system to speed up communication with a critical third-party component. The test system was reworked to streamline the calibration process and reduce dependencies. An additional testing station module using this new configuration was added to dramatically increase production yield.
- Benefits:
- Testing time was significantly reduced, removing the production bottleneck while maintaining the high-accuracy calibration requirement for medical devices
- Deploying a second modular automated testing solution enabled the rapid scaling up of production throughput to support unprecedented market demand
- The improved automated testing process and new test station were deployed in only one week and enabled the company to meet critical medical need during a pandemic
The Challenge
With increased demand for ventilators brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Company had to significantly increase their production of testing and calibration equipment to match the surging production of these medical devices. Manufacturing capacity was being increased with additional production shifts, but the existing testing system wasn’t scalable and couldn’t be expanded to match production throughput.
The testing process for ventilator testing and calibration equipment is extremely detailed, involving precise measurements over lengthy test cycle times. A single station tested multiple UUTs to help optimize the time and use of the instruments. The test department was able to gain some increased capacity by running the tester full time, through all shifts. However, the end-of-line test stations quickly became a manufacturing bottleneck. The existing test system software needed to be upgraded and made more sophisticated to decrease testing time. An additional test station was also needed to match the increased equipment production output. The entire solution needed to be deployed quickly to speed up the manufacturing testing process so that the badly needed ventilator testing and calibration equipment could be rushed to hospitals as soon as possible. |
The Solution
Once the Company decided to build an additional test station, they needed experts who had the technical software expertise to overhaul their existing system combined with the willingness and ability to meet a very aggressive timeline. The second test station would then incorporate the improved software, further increasing the testing stations’ throughput to match the increased production rate. To meet the surging demand for the ventilator testing equipment software, it was determined that changes to the new test system needed to be made within one week.
Test time was reduced by one third while preserving the test method and quality. The test system overhaul was accomplished within one week. |
The existing test station software was written in LabVIEW and TestStand and had provided the Company a solid test system for years. S5 Solutions developed a strategy to rapidly improve testing speed without sacrificing the medical-grade accuracy required when testing the ventilator testing and calibration equipment. First the code was examined and profiled to find time-consuming operations. Improvements in the handshaking timing with a major third-party instrument was identified as an area that could greatly accelerate testing time. The overall communication could be sped up without compromising the connection. Since this instrument was used extensively during testing, any slight time saving would be multiplied by the thousands.
The next phase of speed increase was much more complex. S5 Solutions designed a software algorithm that improved the method of calibration to reach the same target point faster. The new algorithm was able to get much closer to the required calibration level by using a coarse approximation before the slower fine tuning needed to get to the final set point. |
Additionally, the original architecture of the test system had a dependency in its interactions between the multiple units being tested. That interaction slowed the entire testing process. As a final step, S5 Solutions improved the process flow, removing the dependency in the way the three units interacted, freeing the test systems up to operate more independently.
The Results
The new and vastly improved testing systems were able to match the increased production output so the needed ventilator testing and calibration equipment could be delivered to hospitals on an accelerated schedule without sacrificing accuracy.
The overhaul of the testing system’s software had a dramatic effect. The test time was reduced by one third while preserving the test method and quality. The result was the same medical-grade control accuracy with much less time taken to arrive at the calibration point. All of these changes were accomplished within a single week.
The software, algorithm and synchronization improvements combined with the construction of a second test station made it possible to overcome the production and testing bottleneck and deliver the life-saving ventilator calibration equipment desperately needed during a pandemic. |