How Industry 5.0 Can Change Medical Device ManufacturingHow Industry 5.0 Can Change Medical Device Manufacturing

Technologies like chat GPT have become readily available and easy to use on the commercial consumer side of things, said Zakary Tyler Smith, cofounder and CEO of SensFlo, in an interview with MD+DI.  He wants medical device companies to know that these innovations are also at that point in manufacturing.

SensFlo is exploring the use of Industry 5.0 to combine Industry 4.0 capabilities with essential human input to achieve unprecedented precision in monitoring and optimizing injection molding processes.

Smith will present a session at MD&M West, where he will talk about how Industry 5.0 can be especially useful to medical device manufacturers because they typically have high levels of production. It can also help with predicting potential yield and quality issues before they happen, among other things.

Read on for a sneak peek of Smith’s presentation, “Realtime Part Counts, Efficiency, and Process Controls Using Industry 5.0 and AI.”

First off, can you tell our readers a little bit about what you'll be presenting at MD&M West?

Zakary Tyler Smith: Our company, SensFlo, focuses specifically on machine monitoring and artificial intelligence for industrial manufacturing. Traditional Industry 4.0 involves collecting data and using that data, but what we're going to be talking about is Industry 5.0, which is the next generation of application of Industry 4.0.

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It works alongside the human, which I love, because you would think it would go more automated and more robotic, but it's the opposite of that. Humans are such a paramount portion of manufacturing still, so it's using the machine data with the human data to run real-time analytics which ultimately yield improved equipment utilization and production efficiency.

What do you mean by human data?

Smith: It could be a range of things. It could be operator data with regard to what job and what operation they're running. It could be part counts from an operator, such as how many parts they ran in a shift. It could be contextualizing notes. A lot of operators will put notes into software systems with regard to what they're running. Those are a few examples of human data, which is not machine data but relates to the machine data.

And the machine data could be happening simultaneously with the human data?

Smith: That's exactly what it would be. And that's what we are at the core. What we do is we have machine monitoring capabilities. We are collecting the machine data, collecting human data and then we use artificial intelligence to drive insights in real time that otherwise would not be available.

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An example is that we have an alerting system. So, when a machine goes idle, we send out simple text messages or WhatsApp alerts. The operator can respond with why the mistake happened--their perspective on why the machine went out.

Of course, we know from the machine certain information, but that's an example of merging the two together. And then we can monitor trends over time on why the machines are actually going down at specific instances.

You talked a little bit about Industry 5.0, could you expand on that a little bit? You said it's the next generation of Industry 4.0, so what does it involve to you?

Smith: The components of Industry 5.0 are human-centric focused. It puts the focus back on the human. It empowers employees to take ownership of organizational goals. It creates a culture of open communication and leverages big data analytics to gain insights into specific needs and then it builds on the predecessor of Industry 4.0

It uses AI, automation, big data, IoT, machine learning, robotics, and vision systems. It's not one thing and it'll continue to evolve but that's what it's really made up of today.

Why is this topic important for medical device manufacturers?

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Smith: It’s super important on the medical device side because typically medical device manufacturing requires high-volume production. Minutes per day could mean millions of parts over the course of a year, which translates to millions of dollars. So, from a purely revenue perspective, to these organizations we're talking very big dollars of impact. That's one major thing.

The other thing is that we're getting into process-level controls as well. Being able to predict the potential yield and quality issues before they happen for a work in process. By making these correlations leads to scrap prediction, AI, as well as the quality.

Another thing, especially for injection molding for medical, that stands out is that we are really interested in the real-time correlation between the machine that's running and what part is running on that machine. We have both wired and wireless technology that work, hand in hand, for real-time part identification. So that's kind of the foundation of the production environment and then we build everything off of that.

How would you advise medical device companies to go about integrating these alerts and connectivity and Industry 5.0 into their operations?

Smith: I think breaking it up into certain silos of their organization. The first thing is defining, what equipment they have--machine make and model, controller make and model. Those are important for identifying the connectivity methodologies that you could extract the Industry 4.0 data.

There are really three ways where you can get data and you can use all three. There's what would be a digital protocol, there is analog connectivity directly to the PLC, and then there's adding peripheral sensors.

To get started, that needs to be evaluated. This is all stuff that these companies will not know how to do. They would only need to walk us through what machines they have and then we can walk them through the rest.

And then it's similar on the software side of things. What other software systems are they using, and what are they going to continue to use? And then for that software is the data that is on that software, is it available through API access? Is it available through direct database access?

It's really about the data collection. It starts with as at the first level and then once the data is collected, then you can start doing the industry 5.0 solutions on top of that, once we integrate it all together.

What do you hope that your attendees will take away from your session?

Smith: I want them to see that technology's moving very fast. I think certain new technologies on the commercial consumer side of that, like chat GPT that have come out, have become easy to use and are readily available, that these technologies and manufacturing are at that point too. It doesn't need to cost a ton of money. It doesn't need to take a ton of time to implement and there's near-immediate value creation for these companies by taking advantage of this.

And the other part is that they can use their existing infrastructure. It doesn't need to be a major overhaul to be able to do those things.

And then who should attend your session?

Smith: I think C-level executives who are thinking about digital transformation for their business. Also, supervisors, and plant managers want to collect data from different areas of the business to make better decisions. I don't know how many operator-level people will be at the show, but this is a tool that operators use too, to help them get real feedback into the company and what's happening.

A company's good data makes better decision-making, so we try to support all three levels of these organizations.

Smith will be presenting, “Realtime Part Counts, Efficiency, and Process Controls Using Industry 5.0 and AI,” on Tuesday, Feb. 4, from 1:15 to 2:45 p.m., in Room  201 ABCD at MD&M West.