Self-monitoring of Health : A development project with the aim to identify and develop a user-friendly medical device

Abstract: The project was carried out for Semcon’s product development department. The aim of the project was to develop a concept that illustrates Semcon’s competences in their Total Design Office offer. The concept was to be developed within the medical device sector, with the purpose to self-monitor the user's health. The concept should also emphasize Semcon’s focus of being futuristic by analyzing and implementing emerging trends in health care and the medical device industry. At the start of the project a study of Semcon and its competitors was preformed to clarify the development goals. During the development process the Swedish health care system was investigated in order to identify openings for a self-monitoring device for private use. Applications were identified and evaluated according to societal importance and the result was a focus on heartmonitoring devices. The findings shows that heart disease is the most common cause of death and that a large portion of the population suffer from heart-related complications during their lives. The idea was to develop a concept that helped people discover heart problems and to motivate them to improve their lifestyle. Preventive treatment of diseases was identified as a future trend in the healthcare, due to the constant need for cost efficiency and improvements towards patient treatment. The development process was influenced by user involvement to strive for high usability in the concept. Users were identified and invited in two focus groups where their needs and ideas on thetopic of self-monitoring were discussed. By generating ideas from the user’s needs, concepts were formed and developed in several iterations of ideation methods to improved the early ideas of clearly formulated concepts. A workshop was conducted at Semcon were employees shared their expertise to verify and refine the concepts. After a selection process a final concept was chosen, the result was a wristband with an accelerometer and an ECG to provide the user with a quick evaluation of their heart and health condition. A key feature of the concept is the link it provides between user and the physician. The user will get feedback on their collected data and the physician has the ability to monitor patient condition from a distance. A user interface was developed to give the user an easy way to assimilate data without interpret medicinal values.