30 July 2026
Why we’re asking RMIT to build the harder half of this cart.
Prototype One only solves part of this problem, and we know it.
We’ve spent the last few weeks locking a cassette spec, 480Wh, 4S1P LiFePO4, DC-direct delivery, and figuring out how it should sit on a hospital cart. What we haven’t solved is weight. A prototype built to demonstrate a swap mechanism is not the same as a cart a nurse pushes without a second thought for a whole shift, and it should still be lighter than either.
So we asked RMIT’s School of Engineering to consider Prototype One as an industry capstone project, the kind where a company proposes a real problem and final-year engineering students spend an academic year building it. We’re not RMIT-affiliated ourselves. This isn’t our own capstone. It’s a proposal, sitting with their Industry Engagement Team, waiting on a supervisor to decide it’s worth picking up.
The brief we sent splits into three parts.
Mechanical
Get the cassette, dock and frame light enough that abandoning the cart stops being the easier option.
Electrical
Validate the hot-swap contact system under real load and repeated swap cycles.
Biomedical, a stretch goal
The cassette we’ve spec’d runs 13-plus hours, but no real nursing shift comes close. Even a 12-hour shift, the longest common pattern in Australian nursing, leaves headroom. We want to route that unused capacity into a portable vital-signs monitoring module, its own dock-and-slide-out unit, six kilograms at most, that a nurse can carry to the bedside like a briefcase.
We proposed a Semester 1, 2027 start. We’re open to a materials budget beyond what Prototype One itself costs, and to extending the timeline further if it opens a path toward clinical trial support once the vitals module is far enough along.
Nothing here is confirmed yet. If you’re at RMIT and this is the kind of project your students would want, we’d like to talk.