Needle Assembly

The Challenge

Customer: Medical device manufacturer.

A medical device manufacture required a machine to assembly a needle and final cosmetic button into a wearable drug delivery device. The needle insertion into the device was extremely critical to the functionality of the final product. When you think threading a needle into a hole, that was the requirement of this machine. The machine would require 100% validation inspection during processing to verify the process was successful.

The Solution

MiQ was chosen for this application due to our experience in handling small components requiring high precision assembly. To achieve the 10 second cycle time requirement a multi-station rotary dial was used to transport the device to each of the stations performing the work. A combination of high accuracy robotic part handling and vision feedback was leveraged to perform the critical aspect of inserting the needle into the device.

With the critical nature of this device a 100% in process validation was required with data logging of each device, tracked through a unique serial number per device. A combination of vision inspection, confocal sensor measurements, force over distance feedback were used to validate a success device assembly. All data was logged and push to a SCADA management system for historical device data.

Our solution greatly reduced the scrap rate of the manual production method along with increasing production throughput. In process validation on the machine reduced the requirement for off line testing requiring additional resources.