Prototyping Cutting-Edge Medical Devices for Stryker

The first step of this project was to understand the requirements that this system would need to satisfy by interviewing various stakeholders within Stryker as well as experienced orthopedic surgeons. With their knowledge, I defined the feature set that would improve efficiency and patient outcomes while being easy to use inside the operating room.

After capturing the minimum feature set of this product, I defined the principles of this design as:

Efficient: The interface should make the surgeon’s job faster and easier. More reliable. Interactions should be familiar to reduce learning curve but flexible to support different surgical workflows.

Simplified: Interactions should be limited and utilize automation to reduce clicks and while focusing on the key surgical information at each step.

Trustworthy: Although the interface should be simple, it should provide enough detail to ensure the surgeon is confident in their surgical decisions. The surgeon needs to be able to adjust the program’s estimations made during surgery and the system should prompt when higher accuracy is possible.

A functional prototype was created to communicate both the designs and intended functionality to key stakeholders. It showed the flexible framework of having an in-focus image with multiple different image inputs as well as the visual representation of how much bone still needs to be removed, finishing with a checklist of clinical positions to ensure successful range of motion.

The final design resulted in a complete set of wireframes and functional prototype following Stryker’s brand guidelines. The end result was a simple, yet flexible, design that improved surgical efficiency and accuracy of removing bone during hip surgery using algorithms to improve the information provided to surgeons using fluoroscopy imaging. This system has been FDA approved and can be found in operating rooms today.