Last October, Bill Doyle of the oncological treatment company Novocure gave a TED lecture on a novel cancer treatment method that his company is developing. The therapy involves exposing cancer cells to a low-intensity alternating electric field at a few hundred hertz, which disrupts cell...
I recently watched an interesting talk given by Atul Gawande, whose book The Checklist Manifesto has reached the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list this year, talking about some interesting benefits of using a checklist and how such a seemingly insignificant and low tech idea...
Has the Health Savings Account affected consumer's spending habits? Is that affecting the design specification for consumer medical devices?...
As a service company, our staff is our most important asset. Without them, we'd just have a bunch of lonely computers sitting around hoping to one day become self-aware. As such, we work hard to find great people, and we've found some of the greatest....
Are you a tinkerer? For those of us that are concerned about how best to crack open a $1,000 MacBook with a critical soda problem yet have the compelling desire to take it apart anyway, there is help....
As part of the V&V test procedure, we designed a gravimetric means to characterize the volumetric and flow-rate accuracy of a couple of precision injection instruments. With this setup, we're able to achieve measurement resolution of just 0.1 milligram and reduced the error due to...
On the radio I heard about a device that several students at Rice created to help diagnose anemia in the developing world. The device acts as a centrifuge to separate the blood into red blood cells and plasma in just 10 minutes and without the...
Making progress feels good, but when progress slows or I’ve hit a roadblock, it can be frustrating. When I need some fresh ideas, it’s time for a distraction....
Low volume manufacturing is fairly common for complex medical devices, which may call for production of 10 to 1,000 units. Are you targeting a niche market or, for now, a clinical trial? Read about some of the benefits and challenges of designing for low volume...
Prototypes are essential to testing system performance. However, due to the current technological constraints of creating microscale prototypes, compromises in the characteristics of the prototype usually must be made, which can lead to unforeseen, expensive problems on the production line. Fortunately, basic, fundamental models of...
