DENTALEZ, the dental equipment manufacturer with over a century of tradition, offers a wide array of dentistry products and devices including dental chairs, compressors, tools, and vacuums. These are known for their technological advancement, simplicity, and reliability.
One of the flagship products of DENTALEZ is a high-end dental chair, the 6400 Dental Patient Chair. The product features a hydraulic cantilever mechanism and mechanical assistant instrumentation. It offers a wide run of motion and is controlled by a dedicated PCB.
The project's background:
This PCB, called the Control Board, was reaching its inevitable obsolescence. Because of that DENTALEZ started looking for a new design partner such as Conclusive. The customer needed a new Control Board for the chair to replace the existing design and resolve the issue of its component obsolescence.
The new version had to support the existing chair interface and mounting points to reduce the impact on the whole project and even allow old broken Control Boards to be replaced with new ones, thus eliminating any need to keep a stock of old boards around. The other goal was to update the design with a new cloud connectivity interface for easy updates, statistics gathering, and maintenance.
This interface would later be populated with a specialized add-on board that would enable these features and provides necessary wireless cellular interfaces. The new design had to be crafted with longevity in mind, such that manufacturing continuity could be maintained over at least a 10-year lifespan.
The DENTALEZ also set unit price constraints that should have not been exceeded.
The summary of the project’s top priority goals:
- Solve component obsolescence issues.
- Modernize and enhance the chair's capabilities by enabling an interface for internet-based telemetry data transmission.
- Prepare the documentation for the product to comply with IEC Compliance: Medical Electrical Safety per IEC 60601-1 3.1, Medical EMC Test per IEC 60601-1-2 (2014-2), Medical Device Software per IEC 62304.
Solution:
As mentioned above, the solution has been split into two distinct hardware components:
- Control Board: the board used to control the chair’s movement and handle the operator’s commands
- IoT Board: a daughter board for the Control Board, enabling the transmission of telemetric data to cloud databases through cellular network