Hair raising experience thanks to a maxon motor

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Ailesbury Hair Clinic, based in Dublin, Ireland, has seen a 50 per cent increase in people coming forward for hair replacement treatments. When the clinician couldn’t find a ‘next level’ surgical tool to harvest hair follicles for treatments, the clinic decided to design one for themselves and turned to precision drive and motor specialist, maxon for help.

Most existing follicle extraction devices are heavy and bulky, but the team were confident they could design a more streamlined and effective hand-held follicle extraction device that was light, robust, fast and which also had wireless capabilities.

Project Manager Ioannis Ypatidis, a programmer and roboticist, developed the new device. He says he chose maxon's products for the final design because of “their small size and relatively high torque compared to similar options available from other manufacturers”. After initially deciding to go with a geared motor for their device, the team contacted Martin Leahy, maxon's Sales Engineer in Ireland, to discuss concerns about noise and vibration.

“Martin directed us towards choosing a direct drive motor without gears because this would eliminate the issues around noise and vibration while increasing the product's service life,” explained Ioannis. “His advice was extremely valuable and saved us a lot of time on this project. We were going in the wrong direction with our motor choice and consulting Martin allowed us to adapt without wasting a lot of unnecessary time and resources in testing the wrong solutions.”

The new drill is precise, reliable and extremely small with the nose measuring just 0.8 mm. The motor is from maxon’s configurable DCX direct drive range which facilitates the handheld design by offering high power density and torque in a small design.

Using a direct drive solution increased the device’s service life and offered a reduction in weight and vibration compared to geared motor solutions. A rechargeable battery system has made the new tool portable and transferable from clinic to clinic and country to country without the worry about different power supplies.