Because most medical devices include both a durable instrument and a consumable, product developers often face a pivotal question during the early design process: What stays on the instrument itself, and what belongs on the consumable? There is no simple answer to that question. Every product...
Developing products that incorporate new technology requires designers to work in two worlds simultaneously. The first world is that of the technology inside the device itself. What motors, pumps, sensors, custom actuators, or electronics are best to use, given the requirements of the product? The other world...
Sensors are one of life’s unsung heroes: ubiquitous in machinery of all kinds, yet virtually unnoticed unless they light an alarm or malfunction. Think of the warning lights in your car that let you know your tire pressure or brake fluid is low. You may...
It’s best to ask the toughest questions early in the process of developing diagnostic systems when assay and detection technologies are developed in parallel with use case definition. But which questions should you be asking? Below are just a few examples. These questions help identify product features...
Lab on a Chip, Microfluidics, and Sample to Answer are terms we hear a lot when designing medical devices. For years the trend has been to integrate more and more laboratory functions into small disposable chips or cartridges with the ideal goal of being...
The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) just held their annual international conference in Boston, MA. Jeremy Savage and I attended the 4-day event and had the pleasure of listening to some great presentations, ranging from the informative to the inspirational....
It seems that people will buy any of Apple’s “i” products. While some of this is driven by fashion, most of the craze for Apple’s products is the result of a string of exceptionally well designed products. The user delighting design of these products was...
On March 28th and 29th I attended this year’s Micro / Nano Manufacturing Conference in Boston, hosted by The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). The primary tracks this year were nano manufacturing, micro machining, micro molding, and micro metrology. Two years ago I...
Recently I was asked to prepare a 10 min talk about why I became an engineer, what I like about it, and what I do here at Key Tech. ...
Harvard's Microrobotics Lab is publishing some amazing work regarding a MEMS fabrication technique for creating 3-dimensional millimeter-scale robots from 2-dimensional multi-layer components....