Adult Male Circumcision Device for Use in Clinical Settings

Sub-Saharan Africa is the region most heavily affected by HIV, accounting for 67% of HIV positive cases and 72% of AIDS deaths globally in 2007. Public health officials believe adult male circumcision can be an effective HIV prevention intervention and recommend task shifting as an approach to increase the volume of male circumcisions performed in sub-Saharan Africa. Current scale up complications in sub-Saharan Africa include high procedural cost, clinical tools complexity, trained human resources shortages and inefficiencies in health delivery methodologies, preventing many countries from reaching their mass circumcision scale up target goals. A task shifting approach is one method that can both reduce costs and improve healthcare services by delegating critical tasks to less specialized healthcare providers. As a result, the aim of this research is to develop a functional, safe, cost effective adult male circumcision device allowing less-trained healthcare providers to perform the circumcision procedure. This paper discusses the design concept and development of an adult male circumcision device for use in a task shifting clinical setting. Preliminary engineering analyses were completed to support the prototype design, and validation tests on human cadavers and bovine adult reproductive organs were completed to prove the device operates effectively and safely.