Peterlee firm Rigel is a patient success story

Peterlee-based Rigel Medical aims to broaden its worldwide market share with its latest patient simulator technology.

The PatSim 200 – developed by North East engineers – puts medical equipment through its paces by mimicking the most common vital signs of patients, such as body temperature, blood pressure, heart-rate and respiration.

These tests are vital for highlighting faults with medical equipment in hospitals and healthcare facilities, ensuring that the monitors are accurate in real patient situations.

Rigel’s expert team will unveil the product at the MEDICA trade fair in Dusseldorf, Germany, later this month.

Andrew Upton, managing director at parent company Seaward Group, said: “Taking North East developed technology to the world stage is a great source of pride for our company.

“We’re excited to be at another MEDICA trade fair and launching a fantastic new patient simulator.

“It’s great to be part of the thriving medical community and to be able to make the lives of engineers, service companies and healthcare professionals a little bit easier.”

The new device, which is also manufactured at Rigel’s Peterlee base, includes intuitive features such as a large colour display and a memory function for users’ five most used sequences.

Andrew Teasdale, principal systems engineer, explained how the product development process took his team in this interesting direction: “Biomedical engineers perform a lot of tasks over the course of the day – our job is to streamline that process for them and save them time.

“We’ve listened to the feedback of our customers and built features that address their needs.

“For instance, biomedical engineers can spend minutes scrolling through test options, whereas they might only use a handful of tests regularly. We took inspiration from everyday items like digital radios, meaning that now users can recall their five ‘favourite’ sequences at the press of a button.”

Rigel engineers took note of compatibility needs for users, with the result that PatSim 200’s cable ports are compatible with most hospital legacy IBP and temperature cables.