VR, Mixed Reality and Industrial Design for Medical Technology - a perfect match.
At Composit we've been collaborating with the The University of Queensland Industrial Design Team to take digital 3D concepts and turn them into interactive prototypes in a matter of hours - not days or weeks.
Transcript
Leon:
This happens all the time. You have a physical model and you’re like this is not going to work because you've been twisting around on a screen the whole time, or sketching it in 2D, and you're like, the scales are wrong, something's not quite right about it. My name is Leon Fitzpatrick. I'm an industrial designer and I'm based at the University of Queensland working on the, Artificial Heart Frontiers program.
So the problem is heart failure. It affects, you know, tens of millions of people throughout the world. And the grant is focused on supporting research, into current and future states of the problem, particularly with the intervention or mechanical heart intervention. So the broad term for the devices that we're looking at are MCS devices.
So that's Mechanical Circulatory Support. That goes from Total Artificial Heart to small Ventricular Assist Devices that attach to the heart and keep the heart pumping. Our focus in design is not just solving the physical problems of the device, like the industrial design, but also understanding patient experience. So there are often quite large battery packs attached to these. So the batteries is one problem, the keeping the batteries charged and then deciphering alarms. So an alarm goes off. What's happening?
Ben:
Leon and his team had an itch to see what they could do to assist in the design process. So we took a few snapshots of the concepts that he already had, and built a virtual prototype that also included some of the most basic logic around how the components connect and how the device itself might react when it's in use.
Leon:
So I think VR is really interesting because it's iterative and sort of you can drop something in, manipulate it once you've built it, figure out if that hypothesis was was you heading the right direction, and then if not, you know, tweak it, bring it back in and try it again. The fascination I've had with it, and what I'm very interested about in seeing it unfold before my eyes, literally, is this ability to iterate quickly or to bring in, ideas and concepts and then manipulate them quickly and test things that in the physical world, like with a 3D printer for a model, are difficult to simulate.
And that would be basically around user interface, cable connections and alarm audio alarms.
Ben:
What we realized immediately after implementing the virtual prototype was that as soon as the device is able to react to you with even the most basic logic, there's a feedback loop that immediately starts posing new questions about the design and the usability that you just wouldn't get from a static physical model.
Leon:
We're working on grabbing it and unplugging cables and seeing screens, changing the audio alerts associated with the screen changes. So it's all those those things working together, being able to swap components around and or iterate on it quickly, I think, is this is such a a different way of working, I think is really interesting.
Ben:
You can't really beat VR in terms of the spatial nature of how it represents objects. Any designer who uses 3D CAD has spent probably days of their lives rotating objects around on screen to understand the shape of something, but from the second you hit run on a virtual prototype, you put the headset on the things it tells you about your design and the questions it poses, they come thick and fast.
Leon:
This happens all the time. You have a physical model like that's just is not going to work because you've been twisting around on a screen the whole time or sketching it in 2D and like, you know, and you get out physically. That actually is absolutely the scales wrong that something's something's not quite right about it. So the VR environments are great because there is, again, that iterative nature.
Or you can update something quickly or feed it back in or, you know, almost like it could be possibly sketch, cad, VR and then print it. Its validity coming in at all these different stages.
Ben:
So even now when I'm designing something for a simulation, I chuck the headset on and it's like “far out. What was I thinking?” But hey, I guess you want to know how wrong you are as quickly as possible.
Leon:
Yeah. So moving forward, it's, it's the internal validation, testing these things out and making sure that they're on the right track. A next phase would be then using this as a research tool. So we now give these to patients, to essentially get their feedback on is this design feature design feasible? Another version would be then taking it into the actual product in the future, where it's a simulation or training program for, for patients before they get the device.
So quite often in a situation where someone's received a VAD or a device, they have to be trained on this before they're allowed to leave the hospital. So I see this as like a testbed, you know, design tool and as a future actual training product, I feel like this has been around forever, but its applicability and its accessibility and usability is becoming, you know, recently, so much more valid and so much more, achievable or attainable.
Ben:
Thanks to the current maturity of the VR development ecosystem. It's very quick and easy for us to set up a project and start experimenting with virtual prototypes, which makes it quite a fast and cost effective way to start iterating and seeing what happens when somebody picks up your product. As far as introducing VR into the design process goes, it's still super early days, but we're going to keep documenting the process and see what risks or benefits it can yield.