What is the Patch Factory?
The OPZuid ‘Patch Factory’ project is a cooperation between TracXon, Holst Centre, Salvia Bioelectronics, BOM (Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij) and Elitac Wearables and is funded by Stimulus OPZuid and Co-funded by the European Union.
The goal of this project is to contribute to accelerating the health transition by creating a complete patch factory, to facilitate the need of a production facility in Brabant for health related printed electronics devices made by companies, SMEs and start-ups that are also well represented in Brabant.
Background
Introduction of innovative wearable patches and other device archetypes into the healthcare system is limited due to lacking production capacity for high volume manufacturing at a quality level, which meets European Medical Device Regulations and CE certification standards.
The production process and assembly often still contains manual work and so, a high capacity (e.g. volumes larger than 10.000 pieces) at sufficient quality can often not be realized. This impedes large scale manufacturing at medical device level quality.
More importantly, some production steps are often done outside of Europe, not only involving complex logistics but also making Europe vulnerable to major disruptions in manufacturing caused by e.g. pandemics or political reasons.
The Solution:
A Health Patch Factory
This project has the ambition to resolve the major bottle neck towards implementation and production of remote wearable solutions for across the healthcare cycle, starting with prevention to therapy. In particular, the project objectives are:
1. To create an open access patch factory for mass printed electronics located in Brabant;
2. To demonstrate capability of the pilot line on pre-selected use-cases;
3. To expand the ecosystem to more Dutch (and European) parties and generate a sustainable service business model.
Project Partners:
.png "PatchFactoryHybrid Printed Electronics 8"){kind=logo}
