There’s been an interesting switch in healthcare, have you noticed? We’re slowly moving from a “treat-the-sick” philosophy, it seems, to how can we stay well.
Some call it a sick care system changing over to a health improvement system, but whatever you call it, mobile health (mHealth) is turning out to have a crucial stake and part in the global healthcare world.
Donald Jones, writing for Medical Design Technology, notes that new devices and services are allowing consumers to take charge of their own health for the first time.
Of course, it couldn’t be happening if there weren’t so many devices out there that measure our heart rates, test our blood glucose levels, track our blood pressure and temperature, even let us know how fast and how far we’ve run.
And for those with chronic disease, they make it possible to still stay well while out of the hospital, and even traveling around. The vice president of business development for QUALCOMM Inc. believes that “we are on the cusp of something big.”
Jones writes, however, that significant adoption and improvement to health can only be made possible if the products and services are easy to use and address real consumer challenges.
Enter the field of usability engineering. According to Jones, it’s had a long history of incorporating “a user-centered design approach to products, services, and systems,” usually done through studying and understanding end users, coming up with design solutions that meet their needs, developing prototypes and concepts, testing these concepts with representative users, and fixing the design until performance goals are met.
As medical devices become more complex – due to greater availability of technology and the sophisticated tasks asked of them – just exactly what people need to interact well with machines is becoming increasingly critical, according to Andy Anderson, Ph.D, regulatory affairs principal advisor and Teri Bird, project director Clinical Affairs, RCRI, Inc..
Jones writes that new and different challenges and opportunities are presented by the introduction of wireless technologies in health and fitness products.
“One new opportunity is the ability for wireless devices to passively collect data and update sensors (based on user consent), thereby reducing the burden on the user and improving data accuracy. Connected health devices allow actionable, relevant health information to be pushed to the consumer in a timely manner,” he reports.
GPS capabilities are already used in some fitness devices by allowing the user to track exercise routes and compare results with others. And what could lie ahead are cutting edge technologies to identify nutritional content in food, identify pills, and perform other functions that combine real-world imagery with server-side data, according to Jones.
Still, much remains to be done. Understanding how product development processes and lifecycles can be shaped to meet ergonomic factors including engineering standards, while minimizing the impact to overall time and cost of product development, will be critical if those in the medical device industry are to succeed.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
