Circular Recovery of Critical Materials from Discarded Medical Instruments and Batteries: The objective of this project is to identify and characterize lithium and cobalt containing medical waste streams such as complex surgical instruments with batteries which are disposed after procedures.

Phosphoenix is developing a brain implant to restore rudimentary vision in blind people. The full system inlcudes everything from camera-on-glasses, signal processing, wireless communication, stimulation and readout, upto the actual brain implant. The team will work on one of the elements in the full system. The actual case will depend on the background and interests of the students.

Surgical instrument sets are assembled manually using silicone or stainless steel fixation strips, which are screwed or riveted into mesh baskets. This manual process is labor intensive, repetitive and limits scalability, especially in circular refurbishment workflows where instrument sets are repeatedly disassembled and reassembled.
Explore how robotization can support automized assembly of surgical instrument sets, based on technical drawings.