Healthcare
Integrated testing instrumentation in contact lens production: An opportunity to improve quality and reduce costs?
Reimagining the future
Healthcare
Contact Lenses: Differentiation via Technology
The previous wave of innovation in the contact lens market focused on wearer comfort. Will the next wave of innovation focus on usability? Charlie Constable discusses possible avenues for innovation in the contact lens market.
Healthcare
How small can we go? Designing the next generation of implantable neurostimulators
The trend towards greater miniaturisation offers opportunities for innovation within the implantable pulse generator (IPG) design space. It has put renewed focus on the design of the electronics and mechanical packaging. Delivering a market-leading IPG with the smallest volume requires a multi-disciplinary approach that creatively considers functionality and manufacturability across multiple domains.
Healthcare
Designing for experience: how branded healthcare devices can compete against generics
In a landscape of growing competition and new distribution channels, how can branded pharmaceutical devices compete against their generic counterparts? It turns out the answer is quite simple: by leveraging the one asset a generic product doesn’t have - brand.
Healthcare
Ethical challenges in AI-driven diagnosis and healthcare
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid medical diagnosis or rationalise healthcare raises similar ethical challenges as applications of AI in other industries, bias and discrimination among them. A prescription of selective forgetfulness for the AI may be a remedy, argue Roderick van den Bergh and Desmond Cheung.
Healthcare
Reading the signs of migraines with ML: from algorithm to successful product development
Some very common medical conditions like migraine have evaded diagnosis and treatment until now. We explore why Machine Learning might finally be the tool to tame migraines but why it is still not an easy path to a successful product.
Healthcare
The antimicrobial susceptibility testing conundrum
Antimicrobial susceptibility testing at the point of care could slow the spread of antimicrobial resistance, but only creative technology development and regulatory equivalence data will unlock this prize.
Healthcare
Front-loading monoclonal antibody screening for faster drug discovery
Monoclonal antibodies offer promise in the fight against a wide range of diseases, including COVID-19. The length of the discovery process is a barrier to emergency use, however, and poses a commercial risk for pharmaceutical companies. Multidisciplinary innovation could step up the pace, says Verity Jackson.
Healthcare
Remote user testing for medical device development: advantages as well as challenges abound
Remote user testing allowed us to substantially accelerate the development of the CoVent™ ventilator. Dan Lock reviews the impact of social distancing on user research and finds that many of our necessary adaptations will continue to have value. Yet, each new study challenges us to come up with new approaches to inform medical device development.
Healthcare
What failure rate are we willing to accept in cell therapy manufacture? Insights from medical device development
Autologous cell therapies hold great promise in the treatment of many cancers but are generally produced using processes and equipment for which there are concerns as to whether they are sufficiently reliable to support scale-out to 1000s of systems. Medical device development holds important lessons for achieving the required reliability for cell therapy automation equipment.
Healthcare
Biomimetics evolution at the micron scale and beyond
From Velcro to human flight, biomimicry has inspired the development of products and industries. During the 2020s, microfabrication and other bottom-up approaches will likely lead to many more bio-inspired ideas achieving technical and commercial success, says Fred Hussain.
