Medical Design Briefs - November 2023 - 6

Active Implantables:
Put Design at the Heart
of the Process
I
mplantable medical
devices may
be nothing new -
doctors have been
inserting things
like pacemakers
and cochlear implants
into their
patients' bodies for
decades - but as
the relationship between
people and
technology becomes ever more co-dependent,
it's only a matter of time before
implantable devices become an obvious
way to do everything from health monitoring
to long-term drug delivery.
Active implantable medical devices
Oscar Daws
(AIMDs) are getting smaller, smarter,
more connected. They're more efficient,
with better performance and
greater patient data capabilities. All of
which requires a fresh perspective on
the design of such devices.
As a design consultancy, we perform
daily balancing acts between factors like
technical priorities and user complexity,
reducing development risk while building
user trust, or increasing manufacturing
efficiency while retaining an aesthetic
design that people want to live with. The
goal is to find win-win solutions that make
contrasting priorities suddenly align.
These are exactly the sorts of challenges
that designers will need to overcome
as implantables become the norm -
from psychological barriers, including
ensuring patients trust the device and
can effectively and consistently justify its
value, through to designing clever ways
to keep them fully charged.
The design roles involved in taking a
product from idea to manufacture to
use have traditionally been diverse and
distinct. You have engineers and industrial
designers building the physical
product; packaging designers and
graphics experts focusing on instructions
for use and safety messaging; and
website and app creators specializing in
patient-facing user experience and digital
onboarding.
But from a patient's perspective, the
product for an implantable is, in many
ways, its interface. If you think about it, a
patient might never see, touch, feel, or
perceive the implantable itself. The reason
you're reminded it is there is because
you have to charge it, or refill it, or,
increasingly, because of a connected
app. The benefits are real, but the product
doing the work is invisible.
n A New Kind of Design Coordination
With an estimated global market
worth around $85.31 billion in 2021 and
a projected growth to $143.1 billion by
2028, the world is rapidly seeing the potential
in AIMDs. New advancements
are developing all the time.1 For example,
continuous glucose monitoring implants
for adults with diabetes that pair
with a mobile app; inserts that deliver
microelectrical impulses to patients with
sleep apnea to keep their airways open,
and devices that help control the side
effects of Parkinson's, including deep
brain stimulation for symptoms such as
tremor. 2,3
The immense potential in the health
opportunities afforded to us with the use
of AIMDs means these ever more digitally
enabled products also have the potential
to grow in application from niche
and highly specialized medical interventions
to wider quality-of-life improvements.
These could include continuous
health monitoring, or managing longterm
back pain, or even human-machine
interfaces for those with severe disabilities.
Due to the highly integrated and
co-dependent nature of this design challenge,
the job of design manager becomes
increasingly important.
Their vital role is to ensure that every
touchpoint is designed with a seamless
and consistent user experience - from
the physical product design, to packaging,
digital UX and UI, instructions for
use and physician-side software. It's not
like you can just stop using an implantable
if, for whatever reason, you change
your mind. The procedure to insert
and remove it can be very invasive, and
for this reason it is incumbent on the
device manufacturers to adopt a human-centered
approach to every single
design decision.
The battery capacity might sound
like an engineering problem, but it
could have a vast impact on the patient's
quality of life if it means recharging
it more often, especially if the
charging system has not also been thoroughly
designed to be easy and seamless
to use. Therefore, although there is
also a vast untapped potential in AIMDs
for lower-risk health and wellness interventions,
they will require a much
greater level of rigor in the design process
than is often needed with current
health-tech products and apps that live
outside the body.
While the benefits of implantables are
currently more obvious for people with
heart problems or other serious conditions,
we'll also see an uptick in implantable-as-lifestyle-choice.
As humans and
technology become fundamentally more
interconnected (see Apple Vision Pro),
more of us will use implantables to look
after ourselves - an extension of wearable
technology. It's in these contexts
that the considerations above become
even more important. If it's anything less
than a life-saving medical intervention,
people need to want it, and technical
features alone are not enough to make
that happen.
A human-centered approach can help by ensuring every aspect of the system is tested with users by default,
throughout. (Credit: Tone Product Design)
6
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n Pulling Together Different
Elements
While working with Proteus Digital
Health, a pioneer in digital medicines
and the first company to successfully
gain FDA approval for a fully ingestible
digital sensor designed to monitor
Medical Design Briefs, November 2023

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Medical Design Briefs - November 2023

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