Read about the award from the National Science Foundation
SBIR Phase II: Mentelist: Predictive Management of Surgical Instruments
May 27, 2026 - Mente has received a $500,000 Phase IIB supplemental award from the National Science Foundation, extending our SBIR Phase II work on Mentelist: Predictive Management of Surgical Instruments. This award supports one of the most important next steps in Mente’s product development: advancing our RFID instrument tag from a durable, optimization-ready technology to a permanent tag designed to last for the operational life of a surgical instrument.
Mente uses RFID-tagged surgical instruments to automatically capture evidence of what is actually used during surgery. That data helps hospitals optimize surgical trays with objective, case-level information rather than relying only on preference cards, memory, or manual observation. The current Mente tag already supports that work. It is durable, unobtrusive, compatible with routine reprocessing workflows, and able to survive repeated sterilization cycles.
The Phase IIB award funds the engineering required to move beyond a project-based tag and toward what we call the Forever Tag: a tag that can be applied once and function as part of the instrument inventory over time.
Surgical instruments are a demanding environment for electronics. Any tag attached to an instrument has to be small enough not to interfere with use, secure enough to remain attached through repeated handling, and durable enough to tolerate washing, sterilization, inspection, transport, storage, and clinical use. It also has to remain readable after all of that, without creating new work for the OR or sterile processing teams.
Attachment has historically been one of the hardest parts of this problem. Adhesive-based approaches can introduce failure modes that are difficult to see early. If a tag begins to loosen without a clear visual signal, the hospital has both an operational problem and a clinical concern. A tag intended for surgical instruments needs to be reliable, but it also needs to fail in a way that can be seen and managed before it creates risk.
Materials create another challenge. Some polymers can perform well for a limited period, but repeated steam sterilization can gradually degrade them. Over time, exposure to heat, moisture, and cleaning processes can cause cracking, embrittlement, or loss of mechanical reliability. A tag that survives a defined optimization project is useful, but a permanent tag has to tolerate a much longer and less predictable service life.
Mente’s tag design is built around a wraparound encapsulation rather than a simple adhesive attachment. The tag surrounds the instrument on at least one axis, which helps reduce the risk of sudden detachment and creates a more visible pathway for identifying wear or damage during inspection. That matters because sterile processing teams already inspect instruments repeatedly, and visible evidence of damage is easier to manage than a silent failure.
The Forever Tag work builds on that design. With NSF Phase IIB support, Mente is advancing the tag and encapsulation system toward high-temperature, durable plastics. These materials are better suited for long-term exposure to heat, moisture, and repeated reprocessing, but they also require new engineering around tag construction, encapsulation, surface preparation, attachment, and manufacturing.
This is not a simple material substitution. The RFID component has to survive the encapsulation process while continuing to read reliably afterward. The attachment process also has to create a secure, cleanable, durable interface between the encapsulation and the instrument surface. The Phase IIB work will support the engineering cycles needed to make that process repeatable and validate that the finished tag remains readable, mechanically fixed, and cleanable after extended simulated use.
A permanent RFID tag changes the role of instrument-level data. In a project-based model, RFID supports tray optimization by collecting usage data from a defined set of tagged trays. That is valuable because it helps hospitals identify instruments that are consistently unused, review exceptions, and make reduction decisions with surgeon input. But the data stream is still tied to a specific optimization effort.
With the Forever Tag, instrument-level identification can become a persistent capability across the instrument inventory. That makes ongoing optimization more practical because surgical practice is not static. New surgeons arrive, procedure mix changes, preference cards drift, and trays can creep larger over time. Persistent identification gives hospitals a way to revisit tray composition with evidence rather than waiting for trays to become overbuilt again.
Permanent tagging also reduces operational burden. In the current model, if a tagged instrument is lost, replaced, or swapped from inventory, it may need to be re-tagged before it can continue contributing to the usage dataset. A tag designed to last for the life of the instrument makes RFID-enabled inventory easier to maintain because the identifier can move through normal instrument workflows as part of the tool itself.
Over time, persistent instrument identification can support additional workflows beyond tray optimization. The same data foundation can help with tray assembly guidance, tray completeness verification, misplaced-instrument detection, and retained surgical item prevention. These applications still require careful implementation, surgeon review, SPD input, nursing feedback, infection prevention confidence, exception pathways, add-back tracking, and hospital governance. The Forever Tag does not replace those steps. It gives hospitals a more durable data layer to support them.
The Forever Tag is the kind of engineering work that is necessary for scale but difficult to fund through private capital alone. It requires materials development, process design, durability testing, cleaning validation, manufacturing refinement, and repeated design cycles. A permanent surgical instrument tag has to earn trust from perioperative leadership, sterile processing, infection prevention, procurement, and the surgical teams that depend on the instruments every day.
NSF support has been foundational to Mente’s development from the beginning. This Phase IIB supplement helps fund the detailed hardware work required to move instrument-level usage data from a focused tray optimization tool toward a durable capability built into the instrument inventory itself.
The NSF SBIR/STTR program, also known as America’s Seed Fund, supports startups developing high-risk technologies with commercial and societal potential. Phase IIB supplemental funding supports active Phase II companies as they continue technical development and prepare for broader commercialization.
Mente is a surgeon-founded company building a data-driven operating room. Mente captures instrument usage automatically and helps hospitals understand which instruments are used, by whom, in which procedures, and under what conditions. That evidence helps hospitals reduce unnecessary instruments while preserving clinical functionality and surgeon satisfaction.
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