Stryker is a global leader in medical technologies that offers innovative products and services to improve patient and healthcare outcomes.

Every day, millions of medical procedures are performed by surgeons who face the critical issue of retained surgical needles. These small but essential tools sometimes go missing during procedures, leading to severe complications, extended hospital stays, and costly corrective surgeries for the patient. The traditional solution is to perform additional X-rays and time-consuming manual counts, which are far from foolproof.

Our Surgical Needle Tracking system is an iOS app designed to detect, track, and document surgical needles in real-time during an operation to enhance patient safety and streamline surgical workflows.

Hospital administrators use the app to manage essential tasks such as inputting data for surgical procedures, creating user profiles, scheduling surgeries, and accessing valuable analytics.

Meanwhile, the app enables surgeons to focus on performing a successful procedure and worry less about needle logistics. During a scheduled procedure, the operating room staff opens the app to gain access to an intelligent camera system that detects and tracks surgical needles during the procedure. The app holds a count of needles that have been used during the surgery. If a needle goes missing, the system immediately alerts the surgery team with a visual and audio notification, preventing potential harm.

By reducing instances of retained surgical needles, our app enhances patient safety and saves time and money for hospitals worldwide.

Our app is available exclusively on iOS devices. It is developed in Swift and leverages YOLO real-time object detection and API calls to PostgreSQL for database communication.