Designers: Box Clever, San Francisco, California, USA
Manufacturer: Applaud Medical, Inc., San Francisco, California, USA
As one of the oldest recorded ‘illnesses’, Kidney Stones continue to be a source of tremendous pain and suffering that transcends geographic, socioeconomic, and demographic boundaries. Working with leading urologists, San Francisco-based startup Applaud has created Smartsphere - a groundbreaking new system for treating kidney stones. The first part of the SmartSphere system is a high-performance unit designed by Applaud’s engineers to gently beam acoustic energy through the muscle of a patient’s lower back toward a stone lodged in a patient’s urinary tract. There, the acoustic energy beam interacts with the other part of SmartSphere system: tiny energy-focusing particles designed to anchor onto exposed surfaces of the stone. While an earlier generation of products treated stones with acoustic energy, only SmartSphere can treat a stone while using a gentle acoustic energy beam that spares the patient’s internal organs from injury.
The design of the SmartSphere console combines cutting-edge piezoelectric beamforming technology with a precision-engineered high-performance amplifier architecture--all while maintaining an unfailing emphasis on the patient and physician experiences. The result is a high-performance system that is truly a breakthrough in the field. .
Thoughtful user-centered features incorporated into the SmarSphere console include a high-visibility touchscreen with text and graphical cues to guide the urologist and staff through the successful completion of several steps over the course of a 45 minute procedure. A circumferential multicolor light band that can be readily visible from anywhere in the room, has been carefully designed and engineered to convey vital information about treatment status while also contributing to a serene environment for the patient, who is typically awake during the procedure; this reflects the latest research on the surprisingly prominent role environmental factors can play in achieving treatment success in medical procedures. A large physical button,easily accessible on the top of the unit, satisfies critical patient safety risk mitigation requirements for an energy-delivering device while also providing an ergonomic solution for the physician. With its combination of groundbreaking underlying technology and thoughtful design, SmartSphere is a new answer for medicine. Sophisticated. Smart. Raising the standards and expectations for care within this field.
