New Strategies for Technology Products Development in Health Care

Abstract

HealthCare Product Design, and in particular the development of bio-electronic device for diagnosis and monitoring, is usually very complex because it concerns many different disciplines (eg. Medicine, Electronics, Computer Science, Product Design, etc.). Moreover Healthcare products are almost always used by many different actors, for example caregivers, physicians, patients and their relatives. They can be therefore defined as multidisciplinary products. This implies great difficulties during the design and development of new products because it is necessary to consider many different points of view, in particular without forgetting the diverse users’ needs. Healthcare products can be structured as the sum of two components: the front-end layer i.e. the visible part of them, and the back-end layer that is the hidden part of the products. The back-end layer allows the device to work reliably and efficiently from a the technical point of view, on the other hand, the front-end layer is related to user’s acceptability and functioning, so it is probably the most important characteristic to avoid usage errors. As front-end and back-end layers are strongly related, their parallel development is needed in order to test each development step with final users. This activity is only possible through fast prototyping of both components. Both Back-end and Front-end Layers can be subdivided in hardware and software.