Article Excerpt
Many of our clients—established medical device companies—have built a ton of muscle memory when it comes to designing for normed, well-controlled environments. In such environments, we can rely on healthcare providers with a high level of education and expertise to operate devices correctly and deliver care reliably. But as healthcare moves into the home, our clients are surprised at just how much more variability we encounter and must now design for. Many factors that we never needed to consider when designing medical devices for the hospital setting are now realities.
We must now design not for healthcare professionals, but for whoever the caregiver might be. The new user could be the patient’s family member, a friend, or the patient themselves.
Lay users have a wide range of cognitive and physical abilities, and even educational levels. When you design for the lay user in the medsumer era, you need to consider all the factors that impact competence in operating a medical device. For example:
- Literacy and language barriers might cause instructions for use to be misunderstood.
- Buttons on a device console might be too small and too hard to press for users that suffer from arthritis.
- Text on labels and instructions for use might be too small to be legible for users with limited vision.
- Hearing ability needs to be considered as well, since the new home use environment may contain much more ambient noise than a typical clinical environment, so device alarms and audible cues may get lost in the shuffle.
- Learning ability and memory will vary as well. While a healthcare professional typically remembers how to use a device, some lay user may need to return to the IFU every time they use a device because they simply forget
The consumers that we must design for now may have limited abilities compared to our previous user base, so apply the principle of Simplexity. Make your device so intuitive and easy to use that a lay user could probably use it without relying on the instructions for use. That should be the goal. Reduce the number of steps the user must take to operate the device. Make your device more complex in order to make it more usable.
The effort to lower healthcare costs, a big driver behind the consumerization of healthcare, involves shifting the labor costs of healthcare away from healthcare providers onto lay users. But a consequence of this shift is that we must now build more sophistication into our devices. Devices will be more complex and more challenging to develop and more costly to produce.
Relevance
One big movement in many industries has been the ability to do almost everything from your own home, this shift is likely due to covid. The medical field has especially seen lots of movement towards at home care, trying to have the least amount of time in hospital, saving beds for patients who are in more critical care. With this shift there is a lot for designers and researchers to begin to consider.
This article highlights a lot of great aspects to consider when designing anything medical for the home. One of the main points that this article is making is “simplexity”, creating the simplest form and system for a complex product. Making sure to consider who the user is for this product and what types of limitations those users may have. I will take this information heavily into consideration when designing my product, because the focus of implantable drug delivery systems is being able to manage your condition for a long period of time with minimal medical intervention, or little need for visits to the doctor.
Sources
Turpault, M. (2024, August 2). What the medical device industry can learn from consumer product… Delve. https://www.delve.com/insights/what-the-medical-device-industry-can-learn-from-consumer-product-development-practices
