We’ve all seen or heard commercials from the American Stroke Association (ASA) encouraging people who suspect they might be having a stroke to call 9-1-1 right away, because “time lost is brain lost.”. Stroke is the No. 5 cause of death in the United States, killing nearly 130,000 people a year. That’s one in every 20 deaths, according to the ASA. But even if you survive a stroke, you are not even close to being out of the woods.
Before he was an “Outdoor Man” marketing sporting goods in the Rocky Mountains as the Last Man Standing, Tim (“The Tool Man”) Taylor did most of his work indoors — on a little show called Home Improvement. Fortunately for the often accident-prone know-it-all, he had a competent sidekick in the mild-mannered Al Borland, who often knew a better way to get things done properly.
When incorporating human factors into medical device development, conducting user testing and gathering feedback from the device’s target end users is critical. To do this properly, the end user groups must be appropriately defined.
The medical device industry is familiar with quality audits, but is less familiar with the benefits of having a cultural audit to assess the competence, dedication, and passion that each party brings to the table.
Collaborating with a lighting expert can help ensure that a medical device’s lighting system is optimized for the instrument design while keeping manufacturing costs down and streamlining the path from product idea to operating room.
Designing robust products with fiber optics components for everything from medical instruments to jet planes not only demands optical considerations, but thermal, electrical, and mechanical requirements.
Problem solving is what drives the medical device industry. For OEMs to successfully produce medical solutions, they often need to overcome manufacturing challenges. Whether manufacturing a micro component in-house or working with another molding supplier, sometimes OEMs hit roadblocks.
Unique manufacturability and production properties in plastics are increasingly being utilized in the development of medical devices and medical packaging. In the application of any material in a medical device, it must always meet stringent safety requirements and be biocompatible. This article discusses material biocompatibility, as well as the tested biocompatibility of plastics in medical devices.
PTI has been assisting medical device companies with product design and development for over 30 years. Their design and development studio combines state-of-the-art technology with experience in bringing medical devices to market in order to deliver the most progressive and innovative designs.
Precision Glass & Optics (PG&O), global experts in optical manufacturing and precision thin film coatings, offer anti-reflective (AR) optical coatings for biomedical and life sciences applications. Ideal for coating on quartz, BK-7, glass, and a wide variety of other optical materials, the reliable AR coatings improve performance in optical systems, increasing transmission and enhancing contrast.
The new Hybrid from Colder eliminates the need for multiple connections and simplifies the user interface between remote tools and a device. It features an easy-to-use twist latch to securely connect everything in one simple motion.
Avantes’ AvaSpec SensLine family of high Sensitivity, high performance spectrometers are designed for demanding spectroscopy applications such as fluorescence, luminescence and Raman. This new line currently includes six high performance spectrometers that provide high stability, high sensitivity, high speed acquisition and low noise.
Heatron designs, and manufactures highly engineered flexible heaters and heating solutions for the medical device industry. These flexible heaters and heating elements are found in some of the world's most innovative and award-winning medical devices. Heatron offers a range of flexible heaters designed to meet any challenge your engineering team is facing with product design. If there is not a flexible heater solution, Heatron’s engineering team will work directly with you to develop a customized solution that fits your need. The lines of flexible heaters for medical devices are:
Cermax Short Arc Xenon - metal body parabolic reflector lamps have operating power ranges from 300 to 400 W. and are typically used for fiber optic illumination, analytical instrumentation, endoscopy/laparoscopy, and microscopy.
Medical device design and development is the cyclical process of creating a device for a specific task or set of tasks, and then continuously reevaluating its effectiveness and improving upon it until the device reaches obsolescence. Design and development begins with ideation and the creation of a concept that, if found to be both fiscally and clinically viable, is then designed, engineered, and prototyped. This preclinical period includes bench testing — accomplished through simulated use of the product — and animal testing, along with any necessary redesign work.
Throughout the process, the proposed medical device, and the process by which it will be manufactured, is examined for flaws that may negatively impact the device’s safety, market viability, regulatory acceptance, customer satisfaction, usability, or profitability. Any shortcomings are corrected, and the improvements applied to the final design. Due to the wireless connectivity capabilities of many modern medical devices, cybersecurity and interoperability also must be incorporated into the design. Clinical testing is conducted, using human subjects, to further expose flaws and confirm product strengths. Once both the product design and the manufacturing process have been validated and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), production and commercialization of a device may begin.
Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the U.S. experience a stroke, and almost 90 percent of those are ischemic strokes in which a clot cuts off blood flow to part of the brain. To prevent further injury, blood flow to the brain must be restored as quickly as possible.
Empatica Inc has received clearance from the FDA for Embrace, its award-winning smart watch. Embrace uses AI (advanced machine learning) to monitor for the most dangerous kinds of seizures, known as "grand mal" or "generalized tonic-clonic" seizures, and send an alert to summon caregivers' help.
For the first time, researchers have fabricated sensing elements known as fiber Bragg gratings inside optical fibers designed to dissolve completely inside the body.
A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a way to wirelessly deliver light into deep regions of the body to activate light-sensitive drugs for photodynamic therapy (PDT).
Extremely fine porous structures with tiny holes - resembling a kind of sponge at nano level - can be generated in semiconductors.
Tyndall and Sanmina Corporation have announced a research collaboration, which will focus on the development of a novel wireless technology for a commercial wrist-worn health-monitoring platform.
When studying diseases or testing potential drug therapies, researchers usually turn to cultured cells on Petri dishes or experiments with lab animals, but recently, researchers have been developing a different approach: small, organ-on-a-chip devices that mimic the functions of human organs, serving as potentially cheaper and more effective tools.
Cells communicate with each other through a number of different mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms are well-known: in animals, for example, predatory threats can drive the release of norepinephrine, a hormone that travels through the bloodstream and triggers heart and muscle cells to initiate a "fight-or-flight" response.
Each year 40,000 babies in the U.S. are born with a congenital heart defect, often caused by a defective heart valve, which is estimated to account for 8,000 to 13,000 new cases in the U.S. alone.
A team of researchers at DGIST has recently developed a technology which enables to acquire a high resolution mass spectrometry imaging in micrometer size of live biological samples without chemical pretreatment in the general atmospheric pressure environment.
