You will benefit from more than 20 years of successful specialization in medical design when planning your products.

We support you with the realisation of your product, interfaces or packaging - right up to market-readiness. You will receive all the relevant materials and data from us: drawings, models, 3D data (Solid Works / Rhino), VR and AR simulations, click simulators, preparation of the development work in PDFs, as well as the documentation of usability for your usability file, packaging and GUI.

Since 1997, our core service is industrial design for medical and laboratory technical products. This specialisation includes products for the operating theatre, the intensive care unit, the hospital room, the physician's practice, the dental practice, the laboratory, for rehabilitation and for home use. By now, we have designed a wide range of products for each of these segments, and helped bring them onto the market.

Industrial design/product design in the medical field is characterised by the desire of the user for perfect functionality. Here, perhaps even more so than in other areas, since ultimately the restoration and preservation of the health of the patient is in focus. Fashionable gimmicks also have no place here, because most of the products have a very long lifespan, and are usually produced unchanged in the same form for many years - sometimes even decades. The product development times have also increased dramatically over the years due to regulatory requirements, often lasting four or more years (the record is 8 years). In order to persist, the design of the products must be timeless and fashion-free. It can easily be 10 to 20 years between the introduction of a product and the presentation of its successor. Compared with consumer goods, this is an unimaginably long time. Many of the products that we designed in the early years of Held+Team - so at the end of the 1990s - are still unchanged on the market today.

Industrial design in medical technology is characterised by functional performance and reliability. User observation and user interviews are therefore an integral part of our project work. Ergonomic studies, supported by functional models, are the most important means of communication with the user. They are the only way to determine, for example, whether a grip or a handling operation perfectly fulfils expectations, and whether the usability is confirmed. In many cases, iterations are unavoidable in an international environment, in order to finally arrive at a solution convincing with regard to construction and cost-efficiency.

For us, the need for documentation of usability as well as risk management are integral parts of the project work. Thus, we can prepare documents for our customers which can be used for FDA, TÜV and other audits. Of course, economic considerations play an increasingly important role in the development of such projects. Tighter budgets of doctors and hospitals demand better product performance at lower prices from the manufacturers.

This requires us to be able to automatically handle all common process techniques in medical technology, and the associated design-engineering boundary conditions. An IV set which is manufactured 300 million times per year for a few cents obviously requires a completely different set of design-engineering approaches than those that are necessary for the production of a video endoscope, which is produced only a few thousand times, and then sold for a 5-digit amount.

Therefore, in addition to the process know-how, close cooperation with the R+D departments is essential - including the use of 3D CAD, rapid prototyping and rapid tooling. Speaking the same language and being able to exchange data at any time, shortens development times enormously and leads to better, ultimately cheaper solutions.