Repository | Book | Chapter

Design is often seen as a resource to embellish products towards the end of the research and development process. Designers create artefacts that often encapsulate knowledge emerging from research studies. This case study may help in defining the changing role of design in the increasing trend for multidisciplinary alliances and highlight interdisciplinary human-centred practice-based design research where the creation of artefacts play a central role in enabling the building of new knowledge.Artefacts in the real world are all too often designed simply by the manipulation of visual cues such as colour and the aesthetics of shape. Human touch (haptic sense) is a powerful way of recognising and discriminating between objects for people with impaired vision or under conditions where the visual sense is impaired by the environmental conditions (e.g. low lighting, restricted line of sight). Additionally, in complex circumstances where similar objects may be confused, the shape and feel of an object can be important in ensuring that the correct object is selected or acted upon. In many medical settings the complications of low lighting, restricted line of sight and complex arrangements of devices will be present.There has been relatively little empirical work conducted to investigate the haptic sense (active-touch) compared to the visual and auditory modalities and it is therefore less well understood. One situation in which a theoretically grounded, user-centred haptic design approach might be useful is in the design of medical connectors to minimise the occurrence of potentially fatal misconnections. The increasing complexity of medical interventions means that users are required to connect a multiplicity of external tubes to various types of diagnostic and therapeutic devices.Recent high-profile fatalities have put this safety issue high on the government's agenda. As part of a collaborative research initiative, we are proposing that the ability to distinguish between important medical devices such as medical connectors will be enhanced by the development of objects with distinct haptic cues.Current drug delivery systems employ a common connector known as the "luer" irrespective of the drug or route into the body. Our objective is to ensure that the five generic delivery routes (intravenous, intrathecal, respiratory, cardio-vascular and enteral) cannot be connected with one another and are easily distinguishable.There is now significant pressure for research and development into a system of medical connectors so that misconnection of this kind becomes physically impossible.The research brings together expertise in general and regional anaesthesia, critical care medicine, human factors and industrial design. The design and testing of the connector system proposed adopts a human - factors design approach; focusing on the needs and characteristics of the user, and rigorous user testing of the human-device interface. This user-centred, iterative approach provides the cultural basis of the work, but has not yet been widely adopted in the design of medical devices.A series of controlled studies have been undertaken utilising physical and virtual prototype connector designs. These studies informed the design of an easily discriminable set of shapes that have been used in conjunction with a mechanical connection system. The design team have patented a novel engineered solution to enable connection of correctly mating shapes and prevent connection of incorrectly mated shapes. The designers have engineered a mechanical solution to prevent misconnection in combination with shape to speed the process of identification.From the project has emerged a design solution that may contribute to reducing the potentially fatal misconnection of medical devices, while providing knowledge that may inform the design other safety-critical control situations.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7643-8472-2_7

Full citation: