Krish Ramdoo, ENT surgeon for the NHS, had an idea that could help accelerate access to hearing healthcare for thousands of patients. Could a smartphone, together with a novel otoscope device, provide a full hearing health solution outside of the hospital?
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Within 15 months, Team Consulting worked hand in hand with TympaHealth to develop Krish’s idea. Through an iterative process with Team’s designers and engineers, we progressed this prototype device to a pilot medical device suitable for clinical trials. It was quickly and successfully CE marked as a Class I medical device.
Since then, the award-winning device has been used in the United Kingdom, USA and a number of remote locations across the globe.
Team’s ability to understand TympaHealth’s technical requirements and design challenges, to make critical decisions, evolve the design and produce prototypes, quickly allowed TympaHealth to conduct numerous rounds of user studies (enhancing the design in the process) and obtain universal positive user feedback to secure funding and produce commercially viable products.
The TympaHealth device is made of an ergonomically designed handle, cradle and ear speculum. Using smartphone technology combined with a custom designed lens system, it captures images of the ear canal. Pharmacists canconduct a high-definition assessment of the ear with ease and send those images to an audiologist or ENT specialist via cloud technology for further review.
We needed to make the handle easy to use and as ergonomic as possible. To do this, we relied on user feedback from clinical studies to inform the handle design. By building the handle at an angle, the device can be held more comfortably for longer periods of time by both left and right-handed users, without compromising grip or control.
As a designer, it’s been a privilege to be part of TympaHealth’s journey, helping them develop their initial concept and realising their vision to bring their product to market. This is a dream project for any designer or engineer: working with a start-up company who appreciates the challenges of medical device development and allows the design team the flexibility to explore different design solutions, pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
The all-in-one hearing health assessment system uses a smartphone camera to capture and record images of the ear canal. We listened to feedback from healthcare professionals to increase the image quality to meet their standards by introducing a custom-designed optical system in the device. We then fined-tuned this system for both usability and cost efficiency of manufacture.
We developed a series of functional engineering prototypes early on in the process which varied in fidelity. This was critical to enable optimisation of the optical system and ensure the product would be commercially viable.
