Originally Published EMDM May/June 2005
2005 Medical Design Excellence Awards
European Firms Lend Expertise to Development of Award-Winning Products
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Several European suppliers played a key role in the design and development of some of the winning products in the 2005 Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) programme. We asked some of the companies involved about the inevitable challenges they encountered during the development stage, and how they resolved them.
One member of the MDEA judging panel marveled at the simplicity of OptraGate, a more-comfortable alternative to the unwieldy rigid metal retainers used during dental procedures. The flexible plastic ring, manufactured by SFS Intec AG (Altstatten, Switzerland), is easy to insert for the practitioner, and it significantly raises the patient’s comfort level. The finished product may indeed seem simple, but finding the right combination of materials and keeping production costs in line was a complex task.
“We thought we were almost there in 2002,” says Diego Gabathuler, whose firm Ivoclar Vivadent (Schaan, Liechtenstein) developed and designed the OptraGate. “Then we discovered that even a 0.01-mm variation in the thickness of the soft component had a huge effect on the product’s clinical performance.” Meanwhile, there was the issue of financing. “The two-year prototyping phase was very expensive,” he says. “We did not know whether we would be able to develop a [manufacturable] product in the end.” If the enthusiasm of the MDEA judges is any indication, the firm’s persistence will pay off handsomely.
Intuitive operation was a key design guideline for the Motiva interactive healthcare platform manufactured by Philips Medical Systems (Milpitas, CA, USA) . The Motiva connects at-home patients suffering from a chronic disease with caregivers via a personalized TV programme. The sophisticated information and monitoring system had to be designed for use by “people averaging 70 years old who may not be technologically savvy,” says Jolanda Leenhouts of Philips Applied Technologies (Eindhoven, Netherlands), which developed the software for the system and the back-end data-exchange components. As one of the MDEA judges noted, treating the Motiva platform like just another television channel was “inspired.”
Silicon & Software Systems (S3; Dublin, Ireland) was responsible for the design, implementation, and verification of the clinical application software used in the Motiva system. Transparency was a key design element, says Pieter Six, business unit manager, medical systems.
“One of the more significant challenges was to create a balance between providing [clinical] usability and providing the patient with an understanding that there is a caring human monitoring their health rather than a machine,” says Six. The solution, he adds, was to design an interface that made the most efficient use of the caregiver’s time. “A task-based workflow guided by the system automatically compares patient data against a care plan,” he explains. “There is no need to manually review all of the measurements recorded by the system. This allows the care manager to focus on patients that require human contact.”
Teleca, a design house employing more than 3000 consultants, 250 of which work at its Centre of Excellence for Life Science in Stockholm, Sweden, faced a different set of challenges developing the Niox Mino for Aerocrine AB (Solna, Sweden). The handheld device measures exhaled nitric oxide (NO), a marker of airway inflammation.
“Traditional NO measurement devices are expensive and complex stationary systems based on chemiluminescence technology,” says Teleca’s Thomas Schaumann. “Our main challenge was to design a [similarly accurate] handheld device . . . while reducing manufacturing costs compared with conventional systems.” The breakthrough came with an electrochemical sensor that was developed concurrently with the instrument, making it possible to design a device that weighs less than 1 kg (conventional devices weigh 40 kg) and occupies 5% of the space of a stationary system. The sensor is factory calibrated and does not require recalibration during its lifetime. “This greatly reduced the system’s complexity of use and made it a truly plug-and-play device,” says Schaumann.
Successful product design in the medical arena often involves dissimulation: hiding a product’s technical complexity with a simple user interface, for example. Milani design & consulting AG (Erlenbach, Switzerland) took the opposite approach in creating a range of hearing aids for Phonak (Stfa, Switzerland).
“Hearing aids can cause emotional turmoil for the user, who may feel disabled,” says Britta Pukall, milani CEO. “One of our tasks was to destigmatize the [device] by creating a hearing system that is elegant and cool . . . an accessory rather than some scary medical device.” Worn around the back of the ear, the hearing aid practically screams for attention in a range of splashy colours. The firm brilliantly achieved its objective, according to MDEA judges. Like prescription eyewear, they noted, the hearing aids shift perception away from a prosthetic device to a fashion accessory that performs a useful function.
Like the other firms profiled here, milani design & consulting took a fresh look at an existing product and found a unique way to improve on it. EMDM joins Canon Communications llc, which publishes this magazine and organizes the MDEA programme, in applauding their vision.
Copyright ©2005 European Medical Device Manufacturer
