One of the biggest frontiers of our growing connected era is the medical device market, with the promise of smart as well as telemedicine tools aiding not only empowered patient users but also their physicians and health providers. Among the biggest impacts from this movement on design, engineering, and product development for the medical device industry are design innovation and user experience -- and even the realm of disruptive innovation.

The greater need for effective user experiences in medical and healthcare products is heightening the profile of industrial design. This will push greater requirements for collaboration in the product development and management between design engineers and industrial designers, two traditionally discrete groups.

Attendees at MD&M East, co-located with Design News' Atlantic Design & Manufacturing trade event, taking place this week at New York's Javits Center, got a dose of this dawning reality from a keynote address by Sean Hughes, vice president of Philips Design of the Dutch multinational electronics and healthcare giant Philips. (Along with MD&M East, other co-located trade events happening with Atlantic Design & Manufacturing in New York City include East Pack, ATX East, Pharmapack North America, and Plastec East. All are produced and managed by UBM Canon, parent company of Design News.)

As sensors and connectivity give rise to telemedicine, good user experience/user interface (UX/UI) creation is the big key to product success, according to Hughes, hinging on the abilities to enable patient users to become self-sufficient in healthcare delivery and to interact and work smoothly with their doctors and caregivers. "Connectivity is a massive shift" that is affecting the medical device industry, and telemedicine is "an important new innovation," Hughes said, requiring better fundamentals in "interaction design -- appearance, behavior, and workflows."

Hughes refers to "behavior" in the context of ensuring proper device usage, while adding that a premium will be placed on products and devices that allow data sharing between patients and caregivers and data leveraging for healthcare providers. Companies, he said, must never lose sight of the ultimate goal of telemedicine: keep people out of the clinical world.

For a large, globally dispersed firm such as Philips, another key product development challenge is to ensure consistent user experiences on all of its healthcare and medical device platforms, whether they are consumer or institutional. And that comprises factors such as materials, forms, and finishes, Hughes noted.

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Design engineers, get ready, because while we may still be years away from Minority Report-like interfaces (in reference to the Tom Cruise movie, now a decade old), Hughes said we are inching toward a world where "front-end" accessibility and ergonomics will be as critical as the "back-end" engineering.

Following Hughes' keynote, a panel of medical product development experts echoed the importance of understanding user groups, their workflows, and their experiences in the new medical device paradigm.

Tom Kramer, president of Kablooe Design, a product design and development advisory firm, said while the biggest medical device development challenge will remain getting users to adopt new technologies and understand their benefits, he and Craig Scherer, senior partner and co-founder of Insight Product Development, agreed that engineers and designers must stick to the core principles of product comfort and efficiency.