Tag: medical
Medical Device Usability Engineering, a first-hand perspective
I’ve only been at PDD a matter of months as a Human Factors and Usability consultant, but to say that my feet have barely touched the ground, would be an understatement. I’ve travelled to four different countries, and observed 100 participants. In this article, I take a look at why going into the field is so important in identifying device development opportunities…
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Using immersion in the hospital environment to identify innovation opportunities
A global medical device company recently approached PDD with a request to identify product innovation opportunities*. Our human-centred approach for such projects typically involves full immersion in the environment of the user and this project was no different. In this post, I will share some of my experiences of working in the hospital environment, the techniques used, and just generally what I enjoyed from my time in the field.
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What is a medical device?
Over many years of working on medical devices in different contexts, what has often struck me is that people have very different notions of what constitutes a medical device. While this may seem like a pedantic point of semantics, there are valid reasons to reflect on this question more profoundly.
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The medical consumer
I recently watched a TED talk by Joseph Pine entitled ‘What Consumers Want’ (2004), where he talks about an “important change to the very fabric of a modern economy” and takes us through the evolution of ‘economic value’. The journey begins with a commodity-based economy, advances to a goods-based economy, and then progresses to a service-orientated economy. He points out that as a population we are moving past pairing economic value with services delivery, to regarding experiences as the “predominant economic offering”.
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