Telesurgery Platform
Nurep needed hardware that could let a surgical rep watch an operation from anywhere. I led the physical interaction design and form, from early concepts through the first production run.
Nurep's platform lets a surgical equipment rep support an operation remotely instead of standing in the room. Fewer flights, lower costs, same coverage. The hardware needed an overhead camera on an arm that could extend and articulate during surgery, then fold away small enough to store in a cabinet between cases.
Storage and reach fight each other in a design like this, so we prototyped fast to find where the balance actually sat rather than guess at it on paper. Each round tested a different tradeoff between a fully articulating arm in use and a tidy package when it wasn't.
A surgical team touches this thing with gloves on, mid-procedure, without looking at it directly. Every joint, catch, and grip point got tested for that: could you feel where it locked, could you move it one-handed, would it stay put once you let go.
Daily rapid prototyping kept the form and the interaction moving together, each round informing the next, until the arm read as confident equipment rather than an afterthought bolted onto a cart.
The final design had to work with off-the-shelf components and clear the operating room's regulatory bar. We worked directly with the manufacturing partner, a brake-formed metal specialist, and pushed for more organic, complex forms than their standard process usually allowed.
Nurep later became Avail Medsystems, expanding the platform to more operating rooms nationwide.
