Surgibox: a Portable Operating Room for Surgery Anywhere

A well equipped surgical team not only has a bunch of equipment, but also an operating theater to work in. There are charitable organizations traveling the world over providing free-of-charge surgeries, but their reach is limited because a proper OR is still a rarity in many places. A new device is being developed that wraps around the patient and isolates the surgical area from the nearby environment while allowing access for surgeons to do their work.

The Surgibox is still a work in progress, but it’s being rapidly developed by a company of the same name that’s partnered with some folks at MIT to push things forward. The technology reminds us of an Ebola Suit we covered a couple years ago that has the patient wearing an air-tight suit rather than the clinicians working with the patient.



The latest Surgibox iteration involves a frameless, inflatable plastic bag-like container that keeps its shape thanks to clean air being constantly pumped into it via a filter. The constant air pressure helps to guarantee that any pathogen is blown away with the current, while not having a well defined, framed structure helps to make the device small and applicable on just about any patient.

Clinicians’ hands are placed into sleeves that can reach out to the surgical area, and are used similar to how things are manipulated inside those glass boxes with black gloves inside that are used to work with dangerous chemicals.

The next steps will involve testing the Surgibox in a clinical environment and take the lessons gathered there to engineer more product improvements.