Home Healthcare - Need for patient centred Design of Devices

With the improvement in healthcare delivery people live longer. However, they may not be at full capacity. Mortality decreases, but morbidity increases. Unfortunately with healthcare becoming a corporate activity, medical care is becoming very expensive.
This is leading to an increase in home healthcare activity.
In the olden times a large joint family meant that there were enough people to share the care giving responsibility. With the smaller families, which are the norm today and suburban living it is increasingly necessary for many patients to attend to their own care.
Here is where the biomedical designer's responsibility comes in. It is fairly easy to develop a home use device like an injection syringe. Such a thing has to be packed (sometimes double packed) and delivered sterile. This is of no consequence in a clinical environment, where a trained person administers the drug. Shift this to the home. The environment is likely to be less clean than a clinic. The patient (may be with arthritis, certainly anxious) is fumbling to open the packge and suck up the drug into the syringe with unsure hands. She may drop thepackage or compromise the sterility. If the designer foresaw the problem earlier he/she would have done the necessary modifications so that the patient does not feel intimidated.
What is now neede is to address the two people oriented issues: how design impacts behaviour and how people behave under stress. Technology is defined as that which works. If the biomedical device does not work in the home environment it has failed, however great the engineering design for the intended purpose.

This is a very interesting write up on all such home based healthcare issues, which every aspiring (practising ones even more) biomedical engineer must take cognisance of:
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