Industrial design is a fairly recent academic discipline whose emergence is closely linked to the rapid expansion, since the beginning of the twentieth century, of the capacity to transform natural resources into manufactured goods. The entries we solicited for our blog this month will help you understand the criteria and processes by which designers envisage health care innovations, as well as the usability problems that can be reduced or avoided through improved design.
Kurt Hibchen, founding partner of Toboggan, and Helena Urfer, DASUM’s communication officer, talk about the practice of industrial design. What is it? What “good” design entails? Who generates ideas and initiates design projects? What are the roles of designers and end-users? Kurt Hibchen answers these questions and more. He also describes the details underlying the design of a new football helmet (follow separate link below).
There are over 220,000 individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) in the United States today. The majority of them need to use a commode-shower wheelchair for toileting/showering. A survey of veterans with SCI was conducted to seek feedback on existing shower-commode chairs with findings that revealed numerous safety-related issues with these wheelchairs.
In this presentation, Heather Colbert talks about the importance of considering human factors in the design of healthcare solutions.
In this interview with Helena Urfer, Mr Marwan Abboud, Vice-President, Technology and Intellectual Property at CryoCath, describes the design of catheters using cryotherapy and how they are used to treat cardiovascular diseases. He answers various questions such as : How does cryotherapy work? What was the design process behind it? Have users been involved in the process? And how does cryotherapy change the practice of surgery?
Outstanding medical device design is often thought of in terms of out-of-the-box, sweeping innovations. While that perception is certainly appropriate, and applies to some of the 2008 Medical Design Excellence Award winners, it’s not the only kind of design worth rewarding.
A common thread among some 2008 Medical Design Excellence Award winners is that their designs are so well thought-out that they make the caregiver’s job much easier. The winners profiled in the following article are very different from one another. On the surface, a laparoscopic surgical instrument would seem to have little to do with a small patient monitor.
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Since its inception in 1998, the Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) program has become a major competition for the medical technology community, recognizing both the design achievements and healthcare contributions of medical product manufacturers. By reviewing the criteria guiding the judging process, Pascale Lehoux highlights some of the discrepancies between the technological features that are valued by the community of designers and manufacturers and the challenges facing health care systems.
Kurt Hibchen illustrates in this clip a specific design project : a new football helmet. He explains the different steps of the design process from the idea to the final object.
