Abstract
The majority of hospitalized patients require the insertion of a catheter as part of their medical treatment. For catheters to be connected to external devices, barbed connectors are often employed. If this connection is ever disrupted, a direct channel from the environment to the patient's internal body may be introduced, leading to a life-threatening emergency. Current methods of securing catheter tubes to connectors have various limitations that have prevented their widespread adoption in medical settings, ranging from low ease of use to poor geometric compatibility. The authors present a device, called the Catheter Connector Clamp (C-3), shown in Fig. 1 that will securely clamp multisize catheter tubes to existing barbed connectors to increase the security and repeatability of the connection. The authors also propose a method for comparing the effectiveness of current catheter connection solutions to their C-3 design using maximum pull-off force. On silicone medical tubing, the C-3 clamp performed more than twice as well as friction alone (2.09 times more), and 25% better than the hospital gold-standard taped connection.
