Scenarios and the Design Process in Medical Applications

Scenario has been largely used in design progression of different engineering disciplines, mostly in software engineering and Human-Machine Interaction. Scenario helps the software designers to border on the user and usage requirements. Although the design process in many fields of product engineering deals with tasks and functions, and step away from the final users, in medical and healthcare product design the understanding and specification of user requirements become an important issue. Thus, scenario can play an essential role as a tool for engineers to help them to identify and determine the usage of the medical devices. This paper investigates the use of scenarios in design development of healthcare products, and proposes a new concept of using scenarios in the evaluation phase of user dependent healthcare products. Our proposed model for scenario driven approach represents the confrontation between engineering (device design) and medical (usage), through the scenario specification. The new scenario specifies: cure procedure, device functions, usage situation and observation.