The „Tata Nano” approach confirmed

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The „Tata Nano” approach confirmed again in an interesting article in the „European Medical Device Technology” 2014 Article.

A recent article, by Thomas Klein, in the EMDT Spring Issue, p.:8, with the title „What MedTech Manufacturers Need to Copy from Chinese and Indian Companies”, confirms and strengthens further our conviction, that the frugal approach we are following in our development, is the future path for reaching markets such as India and China, with medical device technology, in the 21st Century.

As we communicated in the past years, we strongly believe that the right approach is not „stripping down” sophisticated products developed for the developed countries to succeed in conquering the fast growing third world medical device market. On the contrary, the „frugal engineering” concept of achieving more with less, is going to be the right approach.

This is why our highest priorities throughout the development of  Fluorobot, the only dedicated robotic microscope for TB screening in the world, has been from the beginning:

  • Affordability
  • Robustness (to withstand extreme temperature, humidity, shock, etc. conditions)
  • Small footprint (due to space restrictions in distant microscopy centers)
  • Use of off-the-shelf subassemblies as much as possible (instead of expensive, dedicated developments, or costly general purpose components such as high quality microscopes)
  • Ease of use, ergonomics (self explanatory User Interface for example)
  • Maintainability

In one of our most recent presentations we have prepared for a discussion, we took the liberty to formulate our wish to become the „Tata Nano of TB Screening” (as mentioned in this blog earlier), and visualize it in our own way:

fluonanoOne of the most interesting examples quoted in the article, is an ECG device, developed by GE in an R&D Centre in India, using a bus ticket printer and a telephone component keypad. As a result, the cost of the device is less then a tenth of the models available in developed countries.

We hope to live up to these markets’, and our own, expectations, and arrive to the market soon, with Fluorobot in huge quantities, with its original, frugal, dedicated design, and its cost targeted to be considerably below a setup assembled from commercially available components from the rich world.

Donát Kiss
CEO