Design of Personalized Devices—The Tradeoff between Individual Value and Personalization Workload

Abstract

Personalized medical devices adapted to the anatomy of the individual promise greater treatment success for patients, thus increasing the individual value of the product. In order to cater to individual adaptations, however, medical device companies need to be able to handle a wide range of internal processes and components. These are here referred to collectively as the personalization workload. Consequently, support is required in order to evaluate how best to target product personalization. Since the approaches presented in the literature are not able to sufficiently meet this demand, this paper introduces a new method that can be used to define an appropriate variety level for a product family taking into account standardized, variant, and personalized attributes. The new method enables the identification and evaluation of personalizable attributes within an existing product family. The method is based on established steps and tools from the field of variant-oriented product design, and is applied using a flow diverter—an implant for the treatment of aneurysm diseases—as an example product. The personalization relevance and adaptation workload for the product characteristics that constitute the differentiating product properties were analyzed and compared in order to determine a tradeoff between customer value and personalization workload. This will consequently help companies to employ targeted, deliberate personalization when designing their product families by enabling them to factor variety-induced complexity and customer value into their thinking at an early stage, thus allowing them to critically evaluate a personalization project.

Coping Asynchronous Modular Product Design by Modelling a Systems-in-System

“…The motivation for the topic of this paper is based, among other things, on field observations in which increasing flexibility and customer individualization have an impact on the design of mechatronic systems and modular product families (Albers et al, 2018;Kuhl et al, 2021). In addition, manufacturing companies are facing highly competitive pressure induced by long-term megatrends such as increasing globalization or an accelerated technology cycle (Krause and Gebhardt, 2018).…”

“…Market pressures and new business models to meet these requirements also change the way system architecture design is considered (Skogstad et al, 2022;Gauss et al, 2022;Seiler et al, 2019;Wynn, 2010). Increasing customer individualization has an impact on product diversity and thus also on the handling of increasing internal diversity as well as the complexity induced by this within the company itself (Hansen et al, 2022;Kuhl et al, 2021;Krause et al, 2014). The required flexibility affects collaboration and design in the development process across life phases (Blees et al, 2010;Greve et al, 2020).…”

Research on Customer Requirement-Driven Individualized Product Module Division and Configuration Based on Community Structure

“…Generally speaking, CRs are dynamic and customers are not aware of the technical characteristics of the product but only focus on product behaviour they cause [8][9][10]. Therefore, tools such as Voice of Customer, KANO-model, Quality Function Deployment, Preference Graph, Kansei engineering, and Bayesian networks, are proposed to collect and analyse CRs [11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Development of Business Model Families for Product-Service Systems

“…Manufacturing companies are confronted with the challenge of continuously increasing cost and individualization pressure due to globalization [1,2]. One solution is to further diversify the product portfolio and offer increasingly personalized products [3]. Alternatively, manufacturing companies can transform themselves into providers of so-called Product-Service Systems (PSS).…”

“…In a very product-oriented business model, a high degree of variety is required on the product side in order to configure various product variants for customers (1). However, if the business model shifts toward services, the product is only needed as an enabler for the services and can accordingly be designed from a higher proportion of standard components (3). The variety required to differentiate the offering is achieved via the services, which are significantly more complex than in (1).…”