If you work in medicine or health care, you know that the devices you use must be very good at what they do. This is the way it should be, but medical device products are more than just tools or appliances that help people.

Even though there are a lot of different types and applications. They also have to meet people’s emotional and look’s needs to the best of their abilities. And that’s where the ideas come in.

We will discuss the top five design tips that a smart engineer must keep in mind when coming up with new ways to protect health and well-being. This will make your next project easier to use, safer, and more successful in the market if you follow these tips.

Make the Medical Device Products Easy to Clean

Because of how they are used, medical items may come into contact with bodily fluids, acids, other chemicals, and even living things such as viruses and bacteria. So any product used in this kind of environment must be easy to clean, which will affect the design of the product.

It’s common for many products to be made with plastic injection molding, which means there will be small gaps between the parts. If you cannot avoid these things, there are a few ways to make them less bad.

It’s best to make the actual sealed gap as small as possible. But you can cover these seams with overlapping features or false covers if you need to hide them. A fingertip should be able to reach and wipe down any visible gaps. This is again dependent on the environment where the product will be used.

Better still is to not think about this when you make the first design. There are places where you can’t reach, so be careful. Some areas are hard to access. Remove or redesign sharp internal right angles with bigger and more gradual curves in order to make them less obvious. Overall, it’s best to choose designs that have a single unbroken flat or convex surface that doesn’t allow dirt to build up.

Those surfaces should also be smooth and not have any holes in them. So they can be swabbed, sprayed, or wiped down with cleaners. If there are internal mechanisms, they must seal them carefully to keep them from getting dirty.

Easy to Hold On To

You won’t find any rough or abrasive surfaces in hospitals or medical settings. It should also not be too smooth or sticky if it is meant to be held in the hand. They are made to fit the shape of a human hand and give very good tactile feedback without the need for a tight grip. Softly sanded or matte textures work well for this, but they also look good.

Make Medical Device Products Visible All the Time

Softer materials and colors tend to disperse and absorb light that comes from outside. People often think of hospital rooms or doctor’s rooms when they think of this word. Most of the time they have blue and white fluorescent light that gives off a uniform light. So, metals that are used in this kind of space are usually etched. Wood or plastic surfaces aren’t usually polished or shiny.

In stressful situations, sharp highlights, strong contrasts, reflections, or glare can be both physically and emotionally taxing. All of these design choices help to support a visual environment without these things, which can be both physically and emotionally taxing.

Make it Simple

More medical device products are being used in the home for tests and helping people who are sick or injured. For non-professionals to be able to use them and to make sure they don’t make mistakes, these should be as easy to use and safe as possible. Simplicity is a good way to do this. The shape of the object should show what it is supposed to be for.

Also, this shape should only be used in one way and not in another. People who haven’t been taught how to use it would be able to pick it up and know right away how to hold and use it.

Another good idea is to make the buttons big and only do one thing at a time. If there are essential features, they must be easy to find quickly so that you can use them in an emergency without having to think. In this case, the smart use of color can also be very helpful.

Use Color in a Smart Way

You can use color to communicate information, classify that information, and show people how to use a product in the correct way.

Using strong colors can quickly tell essential or dangerous functions (red and yellow) from safe ones (blue and white) (green or blue). Gradations of hue, going from darker to lighter, also help to show how important things are in a picture. You can also use colors to separate parts of a product that are good guides or reminders about how to use them.

And, of course, color has a strong connection to our emotions, as well! You can use bright colors to add energy and stimulation, and you can use this in healthcare products that help people stay active or work out. Children find bright primary colors fun and appealing, while warm colors like golds and yellows make people feel calm in places where they are supposed to be nurturing.

When you’re in a medical or surgical setting, you’ll see more light greens and blues, soft pastels, and off-whites. These colors are associated with growth and the natural world. On the other hand, bright reds and oranges would be too strong and unsettling if they use them in the wrong way.

What to Consider in Designing a Medical Device Products?

When making these devices, it is important to know how to figure out the risks. What questions to ask, and when. If you don’t know enough about how plastics work, even a great idea for a part can be ruined by a lack of knowledge about how to turn that idea into a durable, cheap, and high-quality plastic part.

These things to think about can cause project costs to rise. Devices to break down, and people to be at risk if they don’t follow them. These materials and technologies have their own limitations. So designers need to know them so they can use innovation and creativity in the best way possible.

Good plastic design is built on a three-legged foundation: the materials, the process of making them, and the mold that makes them.

Material

Plastic parts that are used in medical device products must be thought about in terms of both functionalities. And how easy they are to make. Some plastics used to make these parts are polymers that belong to three main groups: thermoplastic, thermoset, and rubbers (also considered a thermoset). As most medical devices are made of thermoplastic materials, this article talks about them.

Thermoplastics can flow under pressure, shear, heat, and in injection molds. They can also be made into different shapes (tooling). The material is made up of cross-linked monomeric chains that form a resin with unique properties.

It can be amorphous or crystallized. These thermoplastic groups have different polymer chains in them. Which means they have different processing behaviors, shrinkage rates, and mechanisms, as well as different mechanical and environmental characteristics.

Injection molding

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Injection molding machines come in different sizes and have various clamping forces and injection units. The material is heated and pushed into a mold under very high pressure in the injection molding process. Then it cools and hardens, and it is supposed to have specific characteristics. However, the process isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Because the injection molding can change the properties of materials at different temperatures and under different shear conditions. It is important to keep an eye on the process and make sure it doesn’t change the material’s intended properties. A bad injection setting or process can still harm a great design, mold, and machine. Part failure can also include defects that aren’t visible but those that are hidden in the material.

Injection molding starts with plastic pellets in the shape of a solid block. It’s a good idea to dry most materials before putting them in. Failure to do so could make the final product less strong and rigid, as well as less appealing.

Heat and shear work together to melt the pellet material until it is ready to be poured into the mold. You do this by measuring, and it’s done with a screw that pushes the melted material into the mold. This is called metering. The heat is then used to make a solid part, which is pushed out of the mold.

But just making one high-quality piece isn’t going to be enough to get the job done. Molders want a process that they can repeat quickly and efficiently, which ultimately affects the cost of the part. An injection cost is based on the machine’s hourly rate and its time to make a part. When added to the material cost, this cost is what makes a part cost. To do this, you must change the settings on the machine.

Mold Manufacturing

A mold is a powerful machine! People who use it can make it work with hydraulics, pneumatics, or electricity. Measure the loads in tons. It works at different temperatures and under different types of stress, and sometimes it comes into contact with things that can damage the steel.

As an injection molder’s most important tool, the mold can be both costly and time-consuming to make. Some molds can cost more than $100,000 and take up to six months to complete. That cost and time are based on the mold’s specs.

Also, how many cavities it has, how complex the parts it will make, how accurate it is, and how much branding it has. In order to figure out how long a mold is good for. It looks at how many mold shots (presses) it has made. This ranges from a few thousand to millions of presses.

To make sure that you can make the mold, the mold maker reviews the part’s design. Confirms that it can be made, asks for changes in the design, and explains how the mold works. And suggests a gate, ejection, and parting line. The designer will then have to approve these ideas.

Gate type and location are also used to measure the complexity of a mold.

The number of features in a part’s design that you can’t release from the mold without having a moving part in the mold is another way to measure how complicated a mold is (undercuts). Mold parts like slides and angled lifters are used to get these undercuts out of the mold so that you can clean them.

It is recommended that molds be made from standard parts, which will cut both the mold’s start-up costs and its maintenance costs. Using a standard mold base is very common. The mold maker usually sets the standard based on the mold specs, availability, and cost, but this is not always the case.

Finally, designers must make sure that the mold and the injection molding machine work together. How the machine is set up affects the interfaces. This includes where it is mounted on machine plates, how it is ejected and injected, and how it is moved.

Conclusion for Medical Device Product Development

Keep in mind the top 5 tips on designing a medical device. The project’s success will depend on how well you know the injection molding process. You need to consider the tips discussed in this post to ensure your products are of high quality and meet your requirements.

Plastic has been said to have a life of its own, and this is true. In other words, if you want to be original and creative with plastic, don’t do things that go against its rules. Step Rapid is aware of this, focusing on the three basics-materials, the injection process, and the mold.