Interviews mit Geuder Vivos Team

We answer as a team. Geuder AG has developed and manufactured exclusively for ophthalmic surgery in Heidelberg since 1951. VIVOS was created by Geuder's engineers in fluidics, mechanics, electronics and software together with product management, in continuous exchange with ophthalmic surgeons, and with Eckstein Design in Munich for industrial design and user interface. The entry is registered to Olcayto Gülec, Chief Sales Officer, who studied medical engineering in Ulm, and David Geuder, Chief Executive Officer and third generation of the founding family.

The scale. The eye is around 24 millimetres across and the surgical working space is a fraction of that. At that scale, every design decision is immediately either help or hindrance. Few fields give such direct feedback on whether a decision was right.

Chosen. Nobody arrives in ophthalmic device design by accident.

Surgical platforms, handpieces, instruments and the control interfaces between them. We would like to spend more time on the invisible layers: fluidic behaviour, control response and the ergonomics of foot operation, because that is where the perceived quality of a device is actually decided.

Choose a field and stay in it long enough to understand it. Our company has done one thing for 75 years, and the depth that comes from not diversifying is the single biggest advantage we have.

A good designer solves the brief. A great designer notices when the brief describes the wrong problem and says so early, when it is still inexpensive to change course.

It holds up on a bad day. Anything can be evaluated in a showroom. We evaluate on the fourth procedure of a long list, with an unfamiliar team, under time pressure. If it is still calm and predictable then, it is good.

In surgery the value is measurable in attention, time and risk. A device that is understood without instruction frees the surgeon to look at the eye instead of at a menu. In the independent usability evaluation of VIVOS, first time users without prior training on the system reported 91.7 percent overall satisfaction. That is the return on design investment expressed as a number.

Training and simulation tools for surgical education. The transfer of skill between generations of surgeons is still remarkably analogue, and it is a genuine design problem

A surgical environment designed as one system rather than as a collection of devices from different manufacturers. VIVOS consolidates two disciplines into one platform, which is a first step in that direction.

Proximity. Our development area, our assembly floor and the surgeons who criticise our work are all within a short distance of each other. Most design failures we have seen elsewhere are distance problems.

We feel closest to the functionalist German design tradition, from the Ulm school to the work of Dieter Rams: reduction, clarity and the idea that a product should explain itself. In medical technology that tradition is not a style choice, it is a safety principle.

We tend to admire objects that explain themselves without decoration: mechanical instruments, laboratory equipment, aircraft controls. What they share is that the interface follows the task rather than the feature list.

The dual peristaltic fluidic architecture behind VIVOS, protected by patent WO2019020150A1, together with VIVOS Balance. It measures irrigation and aspiration simultaneously and compensates in real time for pressure fluctuations caused by position changes, tubing latency and incision size. What makes it a design achievement rather than only an engineering one is the shift in responsibility: keeping the eye stable becomes a task of the machine rather than a continuous manual concern of the surgeon.

Test with people who have never seen your product and resist the urge to help them. We built that into our process formally, and it changed the interface more than any internal review ever did.

Something else built in a workshop. The instinct in this company has always been to make the thing rather than to describe it.

Design is the decision about how much of a user's attention the product will consume. Everything else follows from that.

The surgeons who let us watch them work and then told us plainly what was wrong, and the research institutions that verified our claims independently, in Heidelberg and in Aachen.

Continuity. The electromagnetically driven vitrectomy in VIVOS descends from a line we began ourselves in 1987 with the MAGNETRON and continued through the MEGA VIT. Several generations of engineers have refined the same principle. That kind of accumulated understanding cannot be bought in.

The central technical obstacle was combining two disciplines with opposing fluidic requirements into one architecture without weakening either. The central organisational obstacle was patience: in a regulated field the proof arrives at the end, and everything before it has to be built on discipline rather than on confirmation.

In use, not in renderings. A photograph of a console tells you nothing about whether it is good. Ten minutes of watching an unfamiliar user operate it tells you everything.

The international rollout of VIVOS following its presentation at ESCRS in London, and the continued development of the platform across its three configurations, Core, Nova and Nova+. Beyond that we talk about products once they exist.

That the device stops being a topic in the operating room. Complete success in our field looks like absence.

Consistency. In medical technology, trust is built over decades and spent in a single bad experience.

Cataract surgery is one of the most frequently performed surgical procedures in the world, and the demand is growing as populations age. Anything that makes such a procedure faster to set up, more predictable and less dependent on individual routine has an effect far beyond the individual operating room. Design in our field is a question of capacity as well as of quality.

The first months of VIVOS in daily clinical use. A platform reveals its character in routine, and what we learn there feeds directly back into the platform.

The wireless combined foot control with individually adjustable pressure point. It removes a second pedal from the floor, offers up to 14 assignable functions on two axes, and adapts to the surgeon rather than the other way round. It is a small object that changes the feel of an entire procedure.

Less accumulation. Devices in our segment tend to grow features because features are easy to list and hard to argue against. Very few products are improved by addition once the workflow is clear.

Towards integration and towards evidence. Separate machines are becoming platforms, behaviour is increasingly defined in software, and usability is increasingly proven rather than asserted. All three shift design closer to engineering and further from styling.

2023 and received its CE mark in the second quarter of 2026. Verification and the regulatory pathway sit at the end of that path and cannot be shortened.

With the procedure, not with the product. We map what the surgeon actually does, in what order and under what pressure, and only then ask what the device has to become.

If it needs explaining, it is not finished.

In our field neither. The procedure sets the design. Surgical technique evolves, and the equipment either follows it intelligently or gets in the way.

Technology is our material. Fluidics, ultrasound, light and control software are to us what wood and steel are to a furniture designer. The design work is deciding how that material behaves in someone's hands.

3D CAD for mechanics and housing, simulation for fluidics and thermal behaviour, electronics and embedded software toolchains, and, at least as important, physical test rigs for pressure and flow, test eyes and wet lab set ups that can be rebuilt the same day.

Colour in an operating room has to earn its place. In VIVOS it is used for orientation rather than decoration: the UNO Colorline coding identifies the gauges unambiguously, 20G red, 23G green, 25G blue, 27G yellow, so the correct instrument is recognised at a glance. The device itself stays deliberately quiet, because the surroundings are already visually busy.

The one place where colour becomes a precision instrument is inside the eye. Two independent LED sources with a steplessly adjustable spectrum let the surgeon set contrast for the tissue in front of them, and retinaProtect to ISO 15004-2 removes the blue component at the press of a button. The housing itself is medical grade polycarbonate with a surface finish designed for repeated disinfection.

What happens when something goes wrong. It is the question that separates a specification from a design, and it is the one we spent the most time on.

We ask who it was made for, and whether that person was in the room while it was being made. It is usually possible to tell.

The surgeon, and yes, without reservation. Every meaningful decision in VIVOS came out of a conversation with someone who operates for a living. Co design in medical technology is not a philosophy, it is a regulatory expectation and a practical necessity.

Ophthalmic surgeons and operating room teams, and the researchers who tested our assumptions independently.

Standards more than books. IEC 62366-1 on usability engineering and ISO 14971 on risk management have shaped our work more than any design monograph, because they are the written record of how devices have failed before. Beyond that, the reading that stays with us is the surgical literature on the procedures our devices serve.

Generationally. The drive technology in VIVOS traces back to 1987, and the operating logic of its interface descends from our megaTRON series. Each generation inherited a working system and had to justify every change to it. That is a demanding school.

The pioneers who created the two disciplines VIVOS brings together: Charles Kelman, who introduced phacoemulsification, and Robert Machemer, who established pars plana vitrectomy. We would like to show them one machine doing both and hear what they would criticise.

Gratefully, and with some distance. In 2026 VIVOS received the Golden A' Design Award in the category Medical Devices and Medical Equipment Design and was nominated for the German Medical Award. We read both as confirmation for the surgeons who trusted a new platform early, rather than as a statement about us. Being known is not the goal in our field. Being trusted is.

We can't answer this for the whole team. But we are a German Company, so imagine some special german stuff.

At the beginning of the project, the project manager consistently followed a “function before design” approach, with the primary focus being on technical feasibility and functionality. However, once the first design prototype was available as a physical demonstrator, it became apparent that the housing appeared disproportionate and overly box-shaped. As a result, the overall enclosure design underwent a fundamental redesign. Several iterations were carried out to achieve a better balance between aesthetics, and proportions, ultimately leading to the design configuration that we have today.

A message from an operating room saying that a case went smoothly. That is more motivating than any internal milestone, because it is the only feedback that comes from the actual purpose of the work.

We would settle for a shorter horizon. Within the working life of the people designing today, we expect surgical care to be limited less by technique than by capacity, and we would like the equipment to be part of the answer rather than part of the constraint.

Every VIVOS carries a small plate reading "Handcrafted with Pride in Heidelberg, Germany", together with the signature of the person who built that individual unit. It is not a marketing device. It is the shortest statement of what 75 years of working exclusively for eye surgery has left us with: the conviction that a device entering a patient's care should have a name attached to it.

Geuder AG has developed and manufactured for ophthalmic surgery in Heidelberg, Germany, since 1951. VIVOS was not created by a single designer but by an in house team: industrial design, mechanical engineering, fluidics, electronics, software and product management, working alongside ophthalmic surgeons.

None of us set out to design a surgical console. We arrived at it from the operating room. Once you have watched a combined cataract and vitreoretinal procedure carried out across two separate machines, with two cassettes, two foot pedals and two operating logics, the design brief writes itself. Our background is therefore less art school and more operating theatre: we design because we have seen what the alternative costs a surgeon in attention and time.

The entry is registered to two members of the executive board. Olcayto Gülec, Chief Sales Officer, studied medical engineering in Ulm, joined Geuder in 2017 and is responsible for sales, marketing, service and application and, since 2026, for operations. David Geuder, Chief Executive Officer, represents the third generation of the founding family and was educated at SRH University Heidelberg. Both steered the project from the board. The engineering of fluidics, electronics and software took place in house in Heidelberg, and the industrial design and the user interface were developed together with Eckstein Design in Munich.

Geuder AG is an owner led manufacturer of ophthalmic surgical instruments and device systems, based in Heidelberg. We were founded in 1951 and we have never diversified: for 75 years the company has worked exclusively for eye surgery. Our products reach surgeons in more than 100 countries.

Development and manufacturing happen in house in Heidelberg. Concept, fluidic architecture, electronics and control logic for VIVOS were created within the company, the industrial design and the user interface were developed together with Eckstein Design in Munich, and final assembly takes place in the same building in Heidelberg. That vertical integration is not a heritage argument, it is a technical precondition: a tightly coupled system such as a dual peristaltic fluidic architecture with real time pressure control can only be tuned if the same organisation owns every layer of it.

The company employs around 220 people.

Design is the discipline that decides how much attention a surgeon has to spend on the machine instead of on the eye. In our field that is the entire point. The eye is roughly 24 millimetres across, the working space is a fraction of that, and the surgeon has finite attention. Every control, every menu level and every unclear status message draws from the same limited budget.

So for us design is not the surface of the device. It is the behaviour of the system under pressure: how it reacts when an occlusion breaks, how quickly it can be set up between two patients, how obvious the next step is to someone using it for the first time.

Objects that are used by trained experts under time pressure, where a misunderstanding has consequences. Surgical platforms, handpieces, instruments and the control interfaces that connect them.

The most rewarding work is usually invisible in a photograph: fluidics, pressure regulation, the feel of a foot pedal, the logic of a menu. A console can be photogenic and still be exhausting to use. We prefer the opposite problem.

VIVOS, and within VIVOS the wireless combined foot control. It operates both the anterior and the posterior segment from a single pedal, so the second pedal disappears from the floor of the operating room. It works on two axes, allows up to 14 freely assignable functions, and its pressure point can be individually adjusted, comparable to a clutch pedal set up for a particular driver.

We like it because it is a design decision that only makes sense if you have stood in an operating room. Nobody asks for a configurable pressure point in a specification document. You only understand why it matters when you watch three different surgeons use the same pedal in one morning.

As a company, our line of electromagnetically driven vitrectomy began in 1987 with the MAGNETRON, followed by the MEGA VIT, which is still sold today. VIVOS is the latest generation of that same development line. The relevant point is continuity: the drive principle underneath VIVOS is one we developed ourselves and have matured over several product generations rather than acquired.

Our own dual peristaltic fluidic architecture, protected by patent WO2019020150A1. It allows intraocular pressure and flow to be controlled together across the whole procedure rather than as two separate concerns, and the entire pressure and flow logic of VIVOS is built on it. VIVOS Balance measures irrigation and aspiration simultaneously and compensates for pressure fluctuations caused by position changes, tubing latency and incision size in real time.

The second answer is light. Two independent RGB-LED sources with a steplessly adjustable spectrum let the surgeon tune contrast to the tissue in front of them, and retinaProtect to ISO 15004-2 reduces the blue component at the press of a button.

The housing is medical grade polycarbonate with a surface finish designed for repeated disinfection, and the interface runs on a 21.5 inch capacitive touchscreen.

In the operating room and in wet labs, watching people work. Almost every good decision in VIVOS can be traced back to something observed rather than something imagined: a surgeon reaching for a control they should not have had to reach for, a nurse changing a cassette between cases, someone squinting at a screen from the wrong angle.

Three: the first thirty seconds of use, the set up between two patients, and the behaviour of the system when something goes wrong. Those three moments decide whether a device is experienced as calm or as demanding, and none of them are visible in a product rendering.

Responsibility more than excitement. Every unit we build ends up in the hands of a surgeon and therefore in the care of a patient. That is also why each VIVOS carries a signature plate reading "Handcrafted with Pride in Heidelberg, Germany" together with the signature of the person who built it. It is a design element, but mainly it is an attitude made visible.

Relief, then curiosity. The moment that mattered most to us was not the first rendering or the first prototype, it was the independent summative usability evaluation to IEC 62366 1 carried out with RWTH Aachen in January and February 2026 with 13 users. First time users, without any prior training on the system, reported 91.7 percent overall satisfaction. That turned intuitive operation from a claim into a measured value.

It stops being a topic. In surgery the successful device is the one nobody discusses during the procedure.

Our own market research points the same way. When surgeons are asked which single criterion decides a purchase, reliability and stability comes first by a wide margin, ahead of clinical outcome and price. Technological novelty on its own justifies very little. A design that is only modern is not successful.

Whether it reduces risk for the person using it. Then whether it can be understood without a manual, whether it can be serviced, and whether it will still be sensible in ten years. Aesthetics matter, but in this field they are the consequence of clarity rather than the source of it.

In medical technology the first responsibility is patient safety, and it is not optional: it is written into MDR, into IEC 62366 1 and into the verification we have to pass before a device may be sold.

The second is longevity. A surgical platform that stays reliable and serviceable for many years is the most meaningful environmental contribution a manufacturer of capital equipment can make. Our devices are built and repaired in the same place they are designed, and the multi patient cassette design reduces consumable changes across an operating day.

Three facts support that. The LED illumination has a service life of up to 60,000 hours, against a few hundred hours for the xenon lamps it replaces. The platform is designed to grow from Core to Nova to Nova+ without replacing the hardware, and existing phaco handpieces remain compatible, so earlier investments are not written off. And service comes from Heidelberg, where the device is built and where the spare parts and the people who know it are.

Three movements are visible in our segment. First, consolidation: functions that used to sit in separate machines are moving into single platforms, which shifts the design problem from the object to the workflow. Second, behaviour is increasingly defined in software, so interaction design and control engineering are no longer separate crafts. Third, regulation has become a design driver. Usability engineering under IEC 62366 1 forces evidence where the industry used to rely on opinion, and we regard that as progress rather than as a burden.

VIVOS was launched nationally at the DOC congress in Nuremberg in June 2026. The international presentation followed at the ESCRS congress in London in September 2026. Surgeons can test it directly on the booth in a wet lab area.

Primarily from the operating room and from surgeons who are willing to be critical with us. Heidelberg helps here: we work in close proximity to a university eye hospital and to the David J Apple International Laboratory for Ocular Pathology, so observation and measurement are a short walk away rather than a research project.

Beyond our own field we look at other high stakes control environments where an operator has to act quickly with incomplete information. Cockpits and motorsport controls have taught us more about pedal feel and status feedback than most medical devices have.

Reduced, quiet and functional. The front panel of VIVOS is deliberately clear and free of feature clutter, because orientation is worth more than demonstration. The touchscreen follows a three column menu that maps directly onto the phases of the procedure, so the interface mirrors the workflow instead of the feature list.

Formally the language is restrained: slate grey and sand gold, a condensed technical sans serif, weight rather than colour used for emphasis. The style exists because the environment demands it. An operating room already contains enough visual noise.

Heidelberg, in the south west of Germany. The heritage is real and it is mostly an advantage: a deep tradition of precision manufacturing, an engineering culture that is comfortable with long development cycles, and universities and clinics within reach.

The disadvantages are the mirror image of the advantages. Development here is thorough and therefore slow, and manufacturing in Germany is expensive. We accept both, because the alternative would be a product that reaches the market earlier and disappoints later.

We are a manufacturer rather than an agency, so our collaboration is mostly with clinics, surgeons and research institutions. Development is co development: surgeons test early, criticise openly, and their feedback goes back into the fluidics and the interface. Independent institutes verify what we believe we have achieved, which is how the usability evaluation with RWTH Aachen and the laboratory measurements in Heidelberg came about.

Involve the designer before the specification is frozen. Most of the decisions that determine whether a product is pleasant to use are taken during specification, not during styling, and by the time a designer is handed a fixed requirement list the interesting freedom is gone.

When selecting, ask candidates to explain a project that went wrong and what they changed afterwards. Portfolios show taste. That question shows judgement.

It runs roughly in six stages. Observation in the operating room and analysis of the procedure. Concept work on the fluidic and interaction architecture. Functional prototypes and wet lab testing with surgeons. Formative usability testing, feeding directly back into the design. Verification, and then the summative usability evaluation to IEC 62366 1, which simulates genuine first use without instruction and is a regulatory precondition for CE marking. Finally release to manufacturing, with each unit assembled and signed in Heidelberg.

The unusual part is that the hardest test comes near the end and is carried out by people who have never seen the device. That keeps everybody honest.

A typical day in the Heidelberg development area moves between three places: the desk, the laboratory and the assembly floor. Fluidics are measured, prototypes are rebuilt, control software is tuned, and somebody usually walks a question over to production or, if it concerns clinical behaviour, to a surgeon.

Because development and manufacturing sit in the same building, the distance between a design idea and a physical test is measured in minutes. That shapes the working day more than any process diagram.

Go to where your product is used and stay longer than is comfortable. The first hour tells you what people say about their work. The fourth hour tells you what they actually do.

Then learn the constraints of your field properly. In medical technology, standards and regulation are not obstacles placed in front of design, they are a written record of how things have gone wrong before. A designer who understands them designs better products, not merely compliant ones.

The positive is consequence. Our work is used by people who are doing something difficult, and small improvements are noticed immediately.

The negative is the same thing seen from the other side. Nothing can be shipped because it is interesting. Every decision has to survive verification, regulation and a surgeon who has no reason to be generous with us. That is slow. It is also the reason the result can be trusted.

If it needs explaining, it is not finished.

Observation first: the ability to watch a process for a long time without proposing anything. Then systems thinking, because in a combined platform a change to the fluidics is a change to the interface. Then the willingness to have your idea tested by someone who does not care whose idea it was. And patience, which in a regulated field is a technical skill rather than a temperament.

On the digital side, 3D CAD for mechanics and housing, simulation tools for fluidics and thermal behaviour, and the usual electronics and embedded software toolchains for the control firmware. Alongside the digital tools, our most used instruments are physical: test eyes, wet lab set ups, pressure and flow measurement rigs, and prototypes that can be rebuilt the same day because the workshop is in the same building.

Through a phase based launch process with defined gates, in which development, product management, regulatory affairs, quality management, sales and marketing each have named responsibilities per phase. The point of the structure is not speed for its own sake, it is that nobody discovers a blocking requirement late. In a regulated product, late discoveries are what actually cost time.

For a platform of this class the honest answer is measured in years rather than months. VIVOS was first shown publicly as a phaco system at the ESCRS congress in 2023, the CE application for the complete platform was submitted in February 2026, and the CE mark was granted in the second quarter of 2026. Verification and the regulatory pathway sit at the end of that process and cannot be shortened. An individual instrument takes a fraction of that time, but it follows the same sequence of observation, prototype, test and verification.

"Can one machine really do both properly?" The question behind it is whether a combined system forces a compromise in either discipline. That is exactly why the fluidic architecture, rather than the feature list, is where we spent our effort.

Watching first time users operate VIVOS without any introduction during the summative usability evaluation. Nothing is as instructive as seeing someone hesitate at a step you were certain was obvious. Several details of the interface exist in their current form because of that study.

Ophthalmic surgeons, eye clinics and hospital departments, served through our own distribution network in more than 100 countries.

The parts nobody photographs. Pressure regulation, the response of the system in the first hundred milliseconds after an occlusion breaks, the resistance curve of a pedal. These are the details that decide how a device feels, and feel is what surgeons actually remember.

The immediate horizon is the international rollout of VIVOS following the presentation at ESCRS in London, and the continued development of the platform across its three configurations.

Beyond that we prefer to talk about products once they exist. VIVOS was designed as a platform rather than as a single device, and the platform is where our development effort goes.

As a team. Mechanical engineering, fluidics, electronics, software, product management, quality management and regulatory affairs work on the same product in the same location in Heidelberg, together with the surgeons who test it. For the industrial design and the user interface we worked with Eckstein Design in Munich, so the outside of the device was shaped by people who design for operating rooms every day.

Several, but in a regulated field we prefer to talk about products once they exist. What we can say is that VIVOS was designed as a platform rather than as a single device, and that the platform is where our development effort now goes.

info@geuder.de Geuder AG, Hertzstrasse 4, 69126 Heidelberg, Germany.

One detail that says more about our design attitude than any specification. Every VIVOS carries a small plate with the words "Handcrafted with Pride in Heidelberg, Germany" and the handwritten signature of the person who assembled it. Nobody in the operating room needs it. It exists because a device that enters a patient's care should have a name attached to it.

That is also the shortest description of what 75 years of working exclusively for eye surgery has left us with: an unwillingness to treat a surgical platform as an anonymous product.