Any equipment used in the front line of surgical or medical applications must meet the stringent requirements and industry standards of this demanding sector.
Steatite has decades of experience in designing, prototyping and manufacturing batteries for use in healthcare settings, and our capabilities in this area are extensive.
What are the common requirements for medical batteries?
The paramount requirement in supplying battery packs for medical applications is reliability. Batteries must run continuously, often for lengthy procedures, without experiencing overheating or variation in discharge performance.
Battery packs must meet rigorous safety standards to prevent any risks of fire, explosions, or leakage of hazardous substances. A BMS (Battery Management System) should be incorporated to provide built-in protection mechanisms, such as protection against overcharge, over-discharge and short-circuiting.
Being able to easily monitor the battery’s state of charge is also essential. Some devices even require a certain threshold capacity before they are operable at all, to ensure that they don’t require changing or charging at a critical point of surgery.
Almost all batteries for use in the medical sector will need to comply with IEC 62133 or its regional equivalent. This is an international standard for the safety of rechargeable batteries, and is a cornerstone for obtaining approval for devices from the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other global regulatory bodies.
Our proven expertise
We have several customers in the medical sector who have specified a range of parameters for their power requirements, so we have various tried-and-tested battery designs for this industry.