Medical Product Design:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
What is the need? What will add maximum value for the end user? It is in this area that the design industry
has developed significantly over the past 20 years.
A. Wilcox, PDD Group Ltd, London, UK
A diversity of design challenges
The first five years of my professional
design career were spent working in the
prosthetic limb industry and in that time I
became knowledgeable about this specialist area. For the past 20 years I have been
working in consultancy and I am now
out of touch with the prosthetic industry,
but have scratched the surface of numerous other areas of the vast medical and
pharmaceutical markets. My experience
ranges from low-cost and high-volume
disposable continence control devices to
high-cost and low-volume drug delivery
equipment. A walk around the 17 halls at
the Medica show in Düsseldorf, Germany,
each November clearly demonstrates the
immense diversity of design challenges
that exist in this market (and this exhibition does not really cover the pharmaceutical industry). No one can be an expert in
all aspects of this industry, but what I can
offer is an opinion of how the design challenges have changed over the last 20 years
and hint at how these may be changing in
the future.
The past, present and future
One thing is certain: technology has raced
forward at an amazing pace. In 1966, in
the film Fantastic Voyage, Raquel Welch
was miniaturised and sent around the
body in a tiny submarine, as was Dennis
Quaid in Innerspace in 1987. Thankfully,
we still cannot miniaturise humans, but
there are now pills with miniature cam-
eras that can be swallowed and transmit
images of the journey through the diges-
tive system for up to eight hours. It is
possible to have a microchip in every pill.
Ingestible event markers developed by
Proteus (www. proteusbiomed.com) are
tiny, digestible sensors made from food
ingredients, which are activated by stom-
ach fluids after they have been swallowed.
They can transmit compliance data to an
externally worn device and even conduct
diagnostic readings along the way.
