Bringing Medical Devices into the Home

This is a podcast episode titled, Bringing Medical Devices into the Home. The summary for this episode is: <p>Are you passionate about human-centered design and how it relates to health care? Patients deserve a high quality experience when bringing medical devices into their home. They want a product that they can use and want to use, without sacrificing any elements that would otherwise exist in a clinical setting. </p><p>In this episode of the Global Medical Device Podcast Jon Speer and Etienne Nichols talk to Dylan Horvath, Founder, President, and Chief Product Officer at Cortex Design.</p><p>Dylan has a degree in Systems Design Engineering and founded Cortex Design to be a firm that fosters human connection, improves health outcomes, and allows people to do things that they couldn’t do before.</p><h3>Some of the highlights of this episode include:</h3><ul><li>Dylan describes design as a tool for understanding how people react and relate to technology. The design of those experiences should create empathy and fit in with a person’s lifestyle and their experience.</li><li>When people bring home and use a new medical device or product, it should not be a completely foreign object. There should be familiarity with it already because it has features that exist in the person’s cultural landscape.</li><li>When developing new medical products, engineers and scientists use different human-led design activities to get something to fit in someone’s home design.</li><li>When designing a product, it’s important for engineers and scientists to understand that they may not be the audience. Ultimately, they’re designing the product for those that are going to use the product.</li><li>Objects tell people how to interact with them. Unexpected behaviors and accordances signify improvements to bad design. Even small changes early on in the design process can have a big impact on user experience.</li><li>Adding risk management methodologies to a product design/development approach and decision-making process is to use economic, regulatory, and market constraints to accurately assume, define, and validate user needs.</li><li>The role beauty plays in medical products and devices is subjective, but there is beauty in well-functioning devices. The thing that is beautiful is when something considers how it appears and how it lives with the people that have it.</li><li>Design only works within the constraints in which both manufacturability and aesthetic perception are successful. You can’t get away with one or the other.</li></ul><h3>Memorable quotes from Dylan Horvath:</h3><p><em>“Design is a tool for understanding how people react to a technology and how people relate with technology, and specifically the design of those experiences so that we can empathize and create products that fit in with a person’s lifestyle and fit in with their experience.”</em></p><p><em>“The challenge when developing medical products is the people and the skill sets and the activities that engineers and scientists typically go through to develop a new product can be very different from the types of activities that you go through to try and get something to fit in someone’s home.”</em></p><p><em>“People design their environments, unknowingly, to sort of fit with the image that they want to project about themselves.”</em></p><p><em>“When you’re designing a product, if you’re designing it for yourself, you can guarantee one sale.”</em></p><p><em>“I really got interested in medical systems because of the opportunity for improving lives. That’s our philosophy to this day.”</em></p><h3>Links:</h3><p><a href="https://ca.linkedin.com/in/dylan-horvath" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dylan Horvath on LinkedIn</a></p><p><a href="https://cortex-design.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cortex Design</a></p><p><a href="https://www.fda.gov/industry/regulated-products/medical-device-overview" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FDA - Medical Device Overview</a></p><p><a href="https://www.greenlight.guru/blog/greenlight-guru-acquires-canvasgt-a-fire-less-side-chat" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Greenlight Guru Acquires CanvasGT: A Fire(less)side Chat</a></p><p><a href="https://www.greenlight.guru/true-quality" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">True Quality 2022</a></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYfQsPqHW8H8mZ4xpM4gn1Q" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Greenlight Guru YouTube Channel</a></p><p><a href="https://www.greenlight.guru/podcast-mtqs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MedTech True Quality Stories Podcast</a></p><p><a href="https://www.greenlight.guru/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Greenlight Guru</a></p>