Exploring the Future of Medical Design

Industrial design
Smart applications
Interconnectivity
1

Pursuit: Deep communication between design and healthcare

What does a smart hospital look like in your mind?

A zero-burden vertical ICU Park where medical staff can efficiently care for patients in the cockpit-style control center;

Family Integrated Care (FIcare) Incubators where young parents can take care of their newborn babies all the time;

Convenient Life Cubes where nurses no longer have to push a transfer bed through the hospital building...

These futuristic works are from the students of Hunan University in China. Since last year, Mindray industrial designers have been working together with students from School of Design, Hunan University to explore new medical design ideas for human factors interaction, aesthetic evaluation, and intelligent generation in the fields of intensive and neonatal care.

Theoretical knowledge can be acquired easily via school lessons, while medical design needs to adopt a more practical approach. The life-or-death nature and complex working environments of the medical industry result in extremely high standards being placed on students' user research and analysis, as well as the application and implementation of creativity. After months of revisions, these design works not only focus on innovation and beauty, but also embody the in-depth dialogue between designers and users.

Insight: A good design needs to be people-oriented

How to define a good medical design? When asked this question, Mindray designers and students from Hunan University repeatedly mentioned one concept: "people-oriented".

This means that designers take the needs and feelings of medical staff as the starting point, and systematically improve the availability and usability of devices. Therefore, User-Centered Design has remained a top concept for Mindray Industrial Design. When evaluating medical devices and environments, designers use emerging Human Factors Engineering research methods to explore and apply human behavior theory, ability limits, and other characteristics to develop solutions that can improve the safety, comfort, and efficiency of diagnosis and treatment, bringing the quality of healthcare to the next level.

Let's listen to the insights of Mindray's Industrial Design team and see what good design looks like in the eyes of designers.

Busy clinical scenarios like ICU, OR, and other emergency rooms require easy-to-use devices and instant data processing from patient monitoring to ensure patient safety. Mindray's industry-leading PMLS design ensures healthcare providers use devices interactively and conveniently with visualized data, strict security, and a clean environment. Our consistent and systematic design bridges the software/hardware barrier, enhancing the user experience across departments and hospitals.

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Medical imaging professionals use devices like writers use a pen: they are integral to their everyday work. The question we set out to answer was, how do we make devices which are intuitive and user-friendly, rather than a burden? Mindray’s cutting-edge MIS design stems from an in-depth study of medical imaging scenarios. It seeks to optimize user and device interaction and bring ease, convenience, and confidence to technicians’ daily work.

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Laboratories worldwide face the same challenge: how to increase diagnostic efficiency in a confined space. Mindray’s evolving IVD design is based on a fundamental understanding of the complexity of IVD settings and workflows, leveraging efficiency in a customized space with automated, integrated digital devices.

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Practice: A continual push to improve healthcare for all

Growing through thick and thin with Mindray for 27 years, Mindray Industrial Design has developed into a comprehensive team with multiple focuses such as design strategy, user research, and human-computer interaction. Talented designers who pursue further studies in Germany, Britain, Japan, South Korea and other countries have created an international industrial design benchmark for the medical industry with mature user experience design, usability testing and other full-process methodologies.

This year, with approval from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China, Mindray was included in the "National Industrial Design Centers" which represents the strongest innovation capability and the highest industrial design level in China.

It's well-known that design should keep going beyond its limits to be up-to-date. As a pragmatic and innovative team, Mindray Industrial Design will continue to enrich its horizons, listen to the voice of medical professionals, enroll new talents and deepen its communication with medical schools, making design a strong enabler of innovation. Together with people from all walks of life, Mindray will endeavor to explore the new frontier of medical design ecology.