Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5.3
Analysis and Discussion
The results shown in Figs.
5
-
7
illustrate the different opinions among the several
individuals that are usually involved in the product design and development process
of medical devices. This was expected from the fact that almost all those involved
will only have immediately contact with a part of the entire process. Probably
only the project coordinator is aware of the entire network of competences that
contribute in some way to the process. However, despite the differences in opinions
that were detected among the inquired profiles, the trends are similar, and there
is clear consensus regarding the different roles that different groups have in the
development process.
Understanding the expectations and the perspective of medical staff and decision
makers is important to facilitate the development of projects in this field. Although
this preliminary survey has enabled identifying some of those aspects, further work
is clearly warranted.
6
Case-Study
Although the discussion above follows from personal experience through the
involvement in several projects related to medical devices, with varying degrees
of complexity (and ambition), as well as team size, a case-study project is useful to
illustrate it.
From 2007 through 2010 a new concept for mobile health was explored in the
scope of the Mobile Health Living Lab project in Guimaraes, Portugal. It aimed
at increasing mobility of patients in hospitals and their homes through continuous
remote monitoring of vital signals, using wireless sensor networks (WSN). These
networks are characterized by several features, such as self-organizing capabilities,
short-range broadcast communication and multi-hop routing, frequently changing
topology due to fading and node failures, and power limitations [
12
]. This solution
has been selected due to similarities with scenarios tackled by other research groups,
such as the SMART system [
13
] and a monitoring system developed at University
of Texas [
14
]. These approaches are in contrast to solutions based on body area
networks (BAN), which primarily collect data from wearable sensors and relay
them to another network, such as the CodeBlue [
15
], BlueBio [
16
] and AID-N [
17
]
systems.
The need was initially identified through discussions between decision makers
and doctors at a healthcare provider and researchers from a university research
center. It initially conceived the use of several support technologies and multiple
support devices. It evolved along the first few months to a specific conceptual
system design, including the need to develop hardware and software applications,
narrowing the aims and goals, and defining project boundaries. During these 3 years,
