Abstract
Turkey has a rapidly growing medical device industry, yet the domestic market is mainly dependent on import trade products. It is also claimed that there is a prejudice against ‘Made in Turkey’ branded medical devices both in the domestic and Global market. In this research, it was hypothesised that the problem could be caused by the limited attention paid on human-centred design among Turkish medical device manufacturers; because the importance of human-centred design is drawing more attention in Today's healthcare industry. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were carried out with manufacturers in Expomed 2017 Medical Devices Fair. Due to the fact that human-centred design is an umbrella term covering several aspects of good design, six of its important topics related to medical device designs were examined: Medical Device Usability, Patient Safety, User Interface, Use Errors, User Experience, and Ergonomics and Human Factors. The results suggested that although the manufacturers had an overall understanding of human-centred design, they mainly take its important aspects into account as much as the regulations oblige.
Keywords
medical device design, human-centred design, Turkish medical device market
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.439
Citation
Kose, N., and Cifter, A. (2018) A Qualitative Study on Turkish Medical Device Manufacturers and the Attention They Place on Human-Centred Design, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.439
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
A Qualitative Study on Turkish Medical Device Manufacturers and the Attention They Place on Human-Centred Design
Turkey has a rapidly growing medical device industry, yet the domestic market is mainly dependent on import trade products. It is also claimed that there is a prejudice against ‘Made in Turkey’ branded medical devices both in the domestic and Global market. In this research, it was hypothesised that the problem could be caused by the limited attention paid on human-centred design among Turkish medical device manufacturers; because the importance of human-centred design is drawing more attention in Today's healthcare industry. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were carried out with manufacturers in Expomed 2017 Medical Devices Fair. Due to the fact that human-centred design is an umbrella term covering several aspects of good design, six of its important topics related to medical device designs were examined: Medical Device Usability, Patient Safety, User Interface, Use Errors, User Experience, and Ergonomics and Human Factors. The results suggested that although the manufacturers had an overall understanding of human-centred design, they mainly take its important aspects into account as much as the regulations oblige.