  Internal fixation is a common orthopedic procedure in which a rigid screw is
used to fix fragments of a fractured bone together and expedite the healing
process. However, the rigidity of the screw, geometry of the fractured anatomy
(e.g. femur and pelvis), and patient age can cause an array of complications
during screw placement, such as improper fracture healing due to misalignment
of the bone fragments, lengthy procedure time and subsequently high radiation
exposure. To address these issues, we propose a minimally invasive
robot-assisted procedure comprising of a continuum robot, called ortho-snake,
together with a novel bendable medical screw (BMS) for fixating the fractures.
We describe the implementation of a curved drilling technique and focus on the
design, manufacturing, and evaluation of a novel BMS, which can passively morph
into the drilled curved tunnels with various curvatures. We evaluate the
performance and efficacy of the proposed BMS using both finite element
simulations as well as experiments conducted on synthetic bone samples.
