Public Funding for Brandon Medical Company Limited

To improve product and service quality driven by the use of automation and data analytics in the manufacture of medical lighting and healthcare devices, increasing productivity.

The surgical light is still the key piece of equipment in a modern operating theatre. If a surgeon cannot see properly, he cannot work safely and effectively. Lighting a surgical wound may appear trivial but it isn’t. It’s very difficult to provide lighting for this application and the vast majority of surgeons express extreme dissatisfaction with their OT lights. The key parameters are colour rendition (Ra), visible red rendition (R9), light intensity, heat, uniformity of illuminated field, beam shape and shadow reduction. No one has developed an OT light that provides a good compromise of all the parameters. The products that are available are all extremely expensive. Use of LED lighting has made it possible to address the issues of light intensity and heat but at the expense of poor colour rendition, beam shape and higher cost. They are particularly poor at visible red rendition, which is the most important colour component in surgery as this is the predominant colour of tissue. White LEDs have poor colour quality because they are blue LEDs coated with a phosphor that emits a yellow light. The resulting blue/yellow is a poor approximation of white light with hardly any red light. Adding more phosphors or by mixing with coloured LEDs can improve the colour but reduces efficiency. We aim to develop a prototype to finally resolve all the outstanding issues. We have a novel, patented, LED lighting technique that solves the hardest issues. HD-LED produces extremely high colour rendition (Ra), visible red rendition (R9) and at extremely high energy efficiency. We aim to push the boundaries of its application to optimise the remaining parameters and create the “perfect” surgical light for surgeons and a fantastic product that we can export worldwide.