During World War II, Kuntscher created the idea of internal fixation. In 1940, he invented an intramedullary nail to put inside the bone cavity in order to fix the position of fractured bone without opening the fracture site during the healing period. The reaming process of bone cavity can remove the inner cortical bone cell, resulting in the enlargement of the bone cavity for the insertion of an intramedullary nail. However, the reamed internal fixation can enhance bone cavity pressure, temperature, bending stress and torsion shear of the intramedullary nail and causing unnecessary additional injury to patients.

An automated bone reaming system (Fig. 2) was built to monitor heat generation during an internal bone fixation surgery. It consists a temperature sensing system to measure the bone cavity temperature, an automated rotor system to provide the controlled rotational motion to the system, which emulates the rotational motion during a surgical bone-drilling procedure, and a wireless receiver gathering the wireless signal representing the measured temperature. Over-heat in the reaming process of internal bone fixation surgery, which is a widely used clinical operation, can cause unnecessary injury to the patient. To improve the operation safety by limiting the cavity temperature (generated by mechanical friction) and torsion shear. Such automated system can regulate its reaming speed depending on the bone cavity environment (temperature and pressure), measured by embedded physical sensors for real-time multi-sensing information (so-called supermedia). A theoretically model on the heat transfer had also derived to improve the temperature prediction. Moreover, the system supported wireless (range: >10 m) and internet transmission to enable future applications in the remote surgery.