Novel pumping technology for Quantex

The brief

PDD Futures is an initiative we run to investigate and inspire the development of new products and services. We then take our ideas off the page and create solid examples, so our clients not only get to see the future on paper, but hold it in their hands too. With that in mind, we’d been analysing the medical pumping market for some time and seen that although there are numerous types of pumps being used for different applications, there wasn’t one that could work for all of them.

What we did

Having looked at all the options available to us, we decided to approach this challenge from a new angle - instead of making more complicated and expensive pumps that would have reliability and maintenance issues and would have to be calibrated or restricted to specific IV sets, why not make the pump part of the disposable? This way, you keep the drive and control unit simple and cheap. So in collaboration with St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, we developed a full hospital pump that did just that. We worked closely with the staff at St. Bart’s to see the challenges they face, and through a process of iterative design, testing and refinement, we created a product that is easy to mount on poles or beds, has fool proof loading of the disposable and a simple and intuitive user interface that tells the nurses, doctors and biomeds the information they need to know, when they need to know it.

Result

By testing our idea in the real world with the people who’ll actually be using it every day, we were able to create something that works – it’s low-cost, easy to use and reliable.