How Are Engineers Actually Using VR for Human Factors Review?

We've been hearing for some time now that virtual and augmented reality technologies are poised to revolutionize medtech, but can a VR system actually help R&D teams develop a medical device? It absolutely can, according to engineers at Cincinnati, OH-based Kaleidoscope Innovation. "When we've got a team that's maybe across the country or across the world, we can get in here and actually be in the same room virtually around the same product," Ben Ko, a biomedical engineer at Kaleidoscope, told MD&M Minneapolis attendees on Wednesday. Ko's colleague Jerry Schafer, a design engineer at Kaleidoscope, demonstrated just how useful VR can be for soliciting human factors feedback early in the development process. For his demonstration, Schafer used a motorcycle in virtual reality as an example (as shown in the image above). There are two ways VR technology can have a meaningful impact on the review of a product, Schafer said. One possibility is what he referred to as a black box review, where an engineer sends a virtual rendering of a product to whoever the reviewer is at that stage, whether it is a client, a manager, a marketing team, etc. "What they can do, which is pretty cool, is they can actually record their review," Schafer said. "They hit record, you don't see a video of them wearing a headset and waving their arms around, you see what they see. You're seeing them walking around [the product] saying 'you kno...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: MD & M Minneapolis R Source Type: news