Focus on Safety: Together, let us ‘Care for Tomorrow Today™’

Since the very first day LINAK® began producing system solutions for the healthcare market, safety has been at the core of our business. For 30 years, LINAK has developed reliable and innovative electric actuators.

Enhancing safety is often a mix of several initiatives. Making healthcare applications able to comply with the rules in force requires a broad focus.

Regardless of what application you are designing, LINAK offers a wide variety of standard and optional safety features.

Based on many years of experience developing electrical actuator solutions, LINAK understands the importance of mixing quality with safety, functionality and design.

Electric Actuator safety features for healthcare applications

To meet the extremely high standards for healthcare equipment, LINAK electrical linear actuators contain many different safety features to ensure that you can rely on your actuator at all times:

Self-lock: To avoid actuator drifting and potentially creating dangerous situations, LINAK electric actuators come with a self-lock function. The minimum self-lock always equals the max thrust lifting performance.

Mechanical end-stop is an extra safety feature, making the actuator ‘first failure safe’. If the electrical end-stop switch should ever fail, the mechanical end-stop effectively stops all movement.

Safety nut: A safety nut acts as a precaution against the potential failure of the main nut. If the main nut breaks, the safety nut will immediately carry the full load, preventing potentially harmful falling.

Safety Entrapment Spline: LINAK offers three different types of spline: mechanical, electrical and ratchet spline. All three spline types prevent the accidental squeezing of limbs between moving parts in an application and prevent the application from being damaged.

Quick release is a vital functionality that ensures fast, controlled lowering of the application in emergency situations, for example, if CPR is needed.

Manual lowering is a standard safety feature for actuators used in Patient Lifter hoists and is used in emergencies if a power loss occurs.

The LINAK series of intelligent OpenBus™ control boxes

Apart from being able to coordinate multiple actuators to form complex and precise movement patterns, they include several safety-improving features, for example:

Power Request: The LINAK OpenBus technology platform has a unique safety concept for ‘first failure safe’ consisting of two separate circuits — data and power request. Both data and power requests need to be active to run a function.

This reduces the risk of unintended movement to a deficient level, increasing the safety of the application.

Mains indicator: LINAK control boxes have a mains indicator. This shows that the application is connected to the mains and cannot be moved safely before unplugging the cables. This reduces the risk of damaging the cables.
 

General safety features include:

Flammability Classified: LINAK products are made of UL94 flammability classified materials i.e. in compliance with IEC 60601-1 requirements.

To minimise the risk of fire hazards, LINAK control boxes are made of UL94 V0 material, an even tougher requirement than stated in IEC 60601-1.

Cable locking: LINAK products include cable locks to ensure that cables are connected at all times and that the application is ready for electrical movement.

The control boxes are constructed with a strong cable lock, protecting cables and plugs against physical stress and strong detergents.

Water protection: Many healthcare applications must withstand water and detergents when washed.

LINAK products for healthcare are at least IPX4 rated; however, when required, our systems can rate as high as IPX6 Washable DURA™.

Different healthcare applications need different safety features required by the relevant approvals

Treatment Couches

For example, with Medical Examination and Treatment Couches, there is a specific focus on safety due to many injuries caused by patient entrapment in or under the couch mechanism:

• Most accidents occur during treatment
• In most accidents, the authorised person was in the room
• The vast majority of accidents occurred due to self-trapping as a result of unauthorised operation by an unauthorised person
• Most of the injuries were leg and feet injuries
   

Using this information and our experience, LINAK has been able to develop specific solutions for injury prevention on these types of applications such as:

• A couch with foot activation needs a lock box or a similar lock function in the foot switch
• Simple 3-stage foot switch with safety stop
• Reverse foot switch activation elements must be operated against the direction of travel

High-end software solutions

As well as mechanical solutions, LINAK has also developed high-end software solutions such as:

Intelligent Ratchet Spline

1. The Intelligent Ratchet Spline, or IRS™ for short, is a system feature designed to improve safety in couches.

As with traditional spline functions — mechanical or electrical — the aim is to prevent damage to the device and increase safety.

The spline functions prevent the actuator from generating tensile forces when the movement is blocked.

The core element here is the control system, which detects when the ratchet spline is engaged and generates certain motion commands or signals depending on how it is programmed.

The functionality of the IRS requires the LINAK linear actuator LA40 HP in combination with controls CO41, CO61, CO65, CO71 or CA63.

Adaptive behaviour can be:

• Opposite procedure for release of the blocking object
• The individually adaptable direction of travel for the opposite procedure
• Audio or optical signal when an obstacle is detected
• When the IRS is activated, the actuator stops without tensile forces occurring
   

2. Software programming for automatic locking of treatment couches. LINAK actuator systems can lock themselves after a certain period of time. This type of self-lock can be programmed individually via the software; the times can be freely selected. Only a deliberate action by the user can reactivate the actuator system, such as a double-click on a control unit. The type of activation is also customisable.

Global presence but local support and understanding

From global presence to local knowledge, safety is in our DNA.

With production sites in five countries and more than 30 sales offices worldwide, we prove our statement of being close to our customers.

Worldwide support, close collaboration, and strong customer relationships are critical factors in our company philosophy.

Understanding the market requirements is vital for us in our effort to continue improving people‘s lives all over the world.

When you choose LINAK as a partner, you build more than 30 years of dedicated application know-how into your solutions. Contact us today here.