BD Odon Device: a mechanic's cork-popping trick became an assisted-birth tool

When labor stalls in the second stage, the hospital has three options, all old: forceps, essentially unchanged since the 1600s; the vacuum extractor, introduced in the 1950s; or a cesarean. As the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology noted in 2021, no new method of assisting vaginal birth had entered clinical practice since the vacuum extractor. Forceps work only in experienced hands, and fewer clinicians now get that experience — while in lower-income settings, where cesareans are often not feasible, forceps can be the only option left.

In 2006 Jorge Odón, a 52-year-old mechanic who ran a wheel-alignment shop in Lanús, Argentina, watched two employees compete to free a loose cork from a wine bottle using a trick from YouTube: slip a plastic bag past the cork, inflate it so it envelops the cork, and pull. He wondered whether a bag could envelop a baby's head the same way. He had no medical training, which may have helped — he treated childbirth as a mechanical extraction problem and built prototypes at home until an obstetrician in Buenos Aires took the idea seriously.

The concept grew into the BD Odon Device, developed with the World Health Organization's backing and the medical technology company BD. In a 2021 feasibility study at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, the device — a circumferential air cuff over the fetal head — was used to assist 40 births, and 78% of eligible women agreed to take part, many saying they wanted an alternative to forceps and vacuum. Births were assisted in every fetal head position tried, though the overall success rate came in lower than published rates for the incumbent instruments.

An air cuff, not metal or suction, grips the head.

The air cuff spreads traction over the entire head, avoiding the point pressure of forceps blades and the scalp injury risk of vacuum cups.

The bag-around-the-cork trick supplied a proven grip principle that clinical instrument design had never tried.

Simple sleeve-and-pump construction needs minimal training and no electricity, matching the constraint that matters in low-resource delivery rooms.

An outsider's view helped: seeing birth as a mechanical extraction problem made a party trick feel like an answer.

Patients welcomed an alternative — 78% consented to the feasibility trial — showing real demand beyond the engineering.

Steal mechanisms across domains: a folk trick solved the grip problem obstetrics had ignored for a century. Where skills are rare, a simple tool beats a better one that needs a master.

The device remains in development rather than in routine practice. The Bristol feasibility study reported a lower success rate than forceps and vacuum and noted devices returned with manufacturing defects, and a systematic review of the literature through January 2025 concluded the evidence base is still being assembled. Forceps and the vacuum extractor — still the instruments introduced in the 1950s — remain the standard, while the Odón device stands as a template for how a low-cost outsider design can attract WHO support and a major manufacturer before it has proven itself in the field.