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Q – What’s the biggest difference in developing medical devices and products for other markets?
Rex -- There are two major differences. One, of course, is that there are probably more regulations covering medical devices than most other things. And, secondly, most medical products come into contact with users who may or may not have actually chosen to use the device. So every medical device essentially has to fit a much wider range of potential users, many of whom by definition are compromised by their health or have some other problem that makes it difficult to use the device or be fitted to the device.
Q – How do you differentiate Omnica from the more traditional design firms that work across markets, including medical?
Rex -- The differentiation is not necessarily something that we created so much as the educational system has created. Most people are trained in one area that’s an arbitrary group of subjects that, for convenience sake, has been divided up that way by the universities and colleges. We’ve always believed, on the other hand, that none of those individual fields were intended to be stand alone fields. You really need the whole of human knowledge, if you will, to design a product that involves as much complexity as today’s devices do. The typical products we work on include industrial design, human factors, mechanical engineering, electronics, software, and regulatory issues -- all the things that we offer as a comprehensive resource.
Q – With the exception of medical devices, most manufacturing has moved to Asia. Do you see medical devices as next to go and, if so, what impact will this have on design?
Earl – We saw this as a threat a few years ago and really worried that design was going offshore. And, now, we don't believe it is.
Rex -- Even with relatively simple products, finding an offshore manufacturer that's right is even harder than finding one on-shore. There's a huge amount of information that has to be traded at the time of manufacturing handoff and if you have language or severe distance barriers, those can make life difficult. The communication will continue to get better. But most of the people that went over there the last 10-15 years did so for the sole purpose of saving money. In the end, most of them didn't save anything.
Q – You’ve described your business as selling “peace of mind”, not medical devices. How do you ensure that “peace of mind” for others as well as yourself?
Rex – It's mostly about communications and competence. We ensure it by having 28 people that collectively possess something on the order of 600 man-years of experience in various disciplines ranging from industrial design to mechanical engineering to electronics, model shop, and so on. We're also selective about the projects that we do. We try to find projects that will interest us. The worst thing that you can be doing is working on a project that just bores you to tears, or if the customer is a pain in the neck.
Earl – Or if they're ill-prepared to do it.
Q – How do you determine this?
Earl – There are several indicators. They need to have an appreciation for what it takes. A lot of people think we're the lottery. They put a dollar on the table and stand back and say, 'Where's my million?' They think that's all it takes.
Rex – It takes a million on the table to get the first dollar. It's the reverse of a lottery.
Q – Have you ever fired a client?
Rex – Oh, yes. It used to take us longer to do that than it does now. We walk away from a lot of projects – at the beginning. Rarely do we allow ourselves to get into a project very far if we don't think we're going to be successful. We learned early on that you're much better off and much more successful to pick the ones where you've got the fit and the interest. Everybody is happier.
Q – One of the trends in medical devices is downsizing products. How do you reconcile that trend with an aging population that’s struggling to cope with products the size they are now ?
Rex – Some of that is very poor design on the part of consumer products. You go to the electronics store and every piece of gear on the shelf – things like amplifiers, tuners and TV’s -- have ten times the features that you will ever need. Consumer electronics has set expectations for all of the features that should be in a product. In many of the medical products, we literally design an on-off button or maybe not even that. We’re big advocates of dumbing down medical devices.
Earl – We fight what we call creeping elegance on a daily basis. People will come in with a product definition and it will have a certain number of features. As the project moves forward, they tend to add features. Part of our job is to beat that back and stop it. The natural inclination is to make things more complex. The reality is that as soon as the project starts to get simple, you’re there.
Q – Do you see more specialized medical devices?
Rex – Medical devices, in general, are pretty specialized. They tend to have narrow application because the interface with the patient is always the most difficult part. So if you try to make it do too many things, it's the old question: Why? A feature that’s not there doesn’t have to be built in, doesn’t have to be tested and it can’t fail. So there are huge benefits to leaving things out. As you downsize, that becomes even more critical.
Earl – The Holy Grail is the tricorder from Star Trek. You walk around, look at it and it tells you everything, including your attitude. That's science fiction. We acknowledge that marketing is a driving factor and have their reasons for what they are doing. And we don't fight it to the point that we're obstinate. But we question it and make sure the right things are being done.
Q – Another major trend is home health care. What kind of changes will this bring to medical devices?
Rex – Well, it puts more and more demand on medical devices because the environment is even less predictable in a home setting than it is in a hospital. In a hospital or doctor's office, you don't worry about dogs, cats and little kids – all of the things you do have to worry about in a home. The device has to be designed to be even more foolproof and harder to mess up. A lot of the human interface on a device is done by the people who program the electronics. Programmers do things for reasons that are logical to a programmer – but not to a normal human being. For most devices, there's absolutely nothing to tell you what to do first. You don't know which button to push. It's not that these products are complicated. It's that the design is horrible. And there have been very few successful efforts to make them intelligible to the average person. |