Designing Home Use Medical Devices: The Challenges and Its Requirements

An emerging trend of the healthcare industry is the huge increase in the number of medical devices being used by lay people at home. Although home healthcare is a fast growing field and home use medical devices are an emerging market, there is surprisingly little information readily available for designers. This paper particularly focuses on the design aspect of such devices. It investigates the design process of home use medical devices and the main challenges in designing such devices. It also presents designers’ perspectives on designing home use medical devices. In order to understand the designers’ requirements in designing home use medical devices, a questionnaire survey was carried out with professional designers. The results are presented and discussed in this paper. A design process model, called the ‘Dual Verification Model’ has been developed specifically for designing home use medical devices.