Design of medical devices--a home perspective

Health care services are moving out to the community and into the home; e-health services, remote monitoring technology and self-management are replacing hospitalization and visits to medical clinics and custom-tailored medicines are making inroads into normative treatment. These developments have great implications for the scope and design of home health care equipment. The paper discusses the unique nature of home medical devices, from a human-environment-machine perspective, focusing on the nature of users, environment and tasks performed. We call for increased awareness and active continuous involvement of health care personnel together with bioengineers, human factors experts, architects, designers and end users--patients and caregivers--in defining the objectives of health care devices and services at home in terms of "all family" use, integrated into the overall surroundings ("smart home"), and as part of a collaborative patient-physician disease management team.