Design of a Smartphone App for Control of  Bioreactors Used for Cell Cultivation

Abstract: Cell cultivation is the process of cultivating cells in an artificial environment outside of their natural body. GE Healthcare develops products for cell cultivation, both the actual cell cultivation instrument and the software for controlling it. Presently GE's bioreactor system can only be controlled and monitored from a screen on amachine beside the cultivation. If the people working with cell cultivation could monitor the cultivations from a smartphone application, they would always know what is going on in the cultivation and could even change parameters if necessary, without having to go to the cultivation. Time is saved and the cultivation can be monitored more often, thus can problems in the cultivation be discovered earlier and the risk of the cultivation perishing is decreased. An iterative design process with focus on usability was used to explore what functions the cell cultivators need in a smartphone application to support their work, and different design prototypes were explored together with the cell cultivators and usability experts. The result showed that the necessary functions in the application mainly involves monitoring of the most important values, a list of elevated alarms and the history chart for the values, but controlling of the system such as turning functions on/off and changing setpoints is also useful in some situations. This report can be used as groundwork for future development of smartphone applications for cell cultivation.