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.
When designing parts for injection molding, you may need to consider finishing options, which can help improve a part’s mechanical properties, enhance surface finishes, facilitate the final assembly process, or just further customize your part or parts.
Developing medical device parts is a high-stakes process, and material choice is an important decision. Five strong contenders include PEEK, PEI, and PPSU; polycarbonates; medical-grade liquid silicone rubber; and 3D-printed titanium and ABS-like WaterShed XC 11122.
Enhancing project management with analytics creates project intelligence, shifting a task-based activity to a performance-driven one. This article discusses the importance of using actionable insights within pharmaceutical and biotech industries and the benefits that they provide.
Product designers often need their manufacturing suppliers to produce plastic injection-molded parts that are Pantone color-matched to company specifications. Protolabs' injection molding service offers custom color matching on customer-provided Pantone numbers and on customer-provided part samples.
Using the newly discovered process, different grades of PLA can be removed from a stream of commingled plastics and broken down to give high value chemicals.
PTI’s scientific injection molding services are ideal for the manufacture of medical devices because of the four process parameters monitored during production. This controlled process is data driven and highly repeatable which yields Six-Sigma quality products.
Details Make the Difference
West is a preferred partner for injection molded parts services to the world's leading medical device, drug delivery device and diagnostics customers. From cleanroom manufacturing environments to the latest in process monitoring technology, the West Contract Manufacturing division is continually expanding its capabilities to meet the needs of a changing global market.
Being able to create prototype injection molded components and assemblies quickly gives product developers a critical competitive edge.
Cardinal Health offers Uni-Patch™ PolyHesive® blue gel stimulating electrodes that are designed specifically for patients with skin sensitivities. The PolyHesive® conductive blue gel provides a clean, efficient, temporary bond to skin surfaces for the most comfortable treatments possible.
The ZeGage™ Pro and ZeGage™ Pro HR are scanning white light interferometers that provide 3D optical surface profiling for the measurement of precision surfaces that require non-contact metrology. The base ZeGage™ Pro model delivers surface mapping at the nanometer scale, meeting the needs for most industrial surfaces. For smoother samples with a much finer surface finish, the ZeGage™ Pro HR offers more than 20X higher precision with 0.15 nm vertical precision.
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.
