Michael Graves Design creates "visually appealing" medical furniture for CVS

American studio Michael Graves Design has created a collection of home healthcare products for a major US pharmacy that is meant to "enhance people's lives with moments of joy".

The collection, called CVS Health by Michael Graves Design, features six items that fall into one of two categories – mobility or bath safety. The products include a shower chair designed to look like real furniture and a foldable walker.

CVS Health by Michael Graves Design is a range of accessible products for the home

Michael Graves Design, which was founded by AIA Gold Medal-winning architect Michael Graves, began the design process with a research phase that included interviews and in-house observations with users, caregivers and clinicians.

That research informed the design of the final products, which are intended to be both attractive and highly functional – a rarity in the world of home medical equipment.

Michael Graves Design created the collection for the popular US pharmacy chain

"We are reinventing the home healthcare category with products that are research-insight driven, visually appealing, full of character and purpose, and that enhance people's lives with moments of joy," said the New Jersey-based studio.

The products help elevate the "quality and dignity that consumers should expect", said design principal Donald Strum.

"We are thrilled by the collaboration and the powerful change it will bring to disabled people, elders and the people who provide care for all of us."

The range can be divided into mobility and bath safety products

Among the bathroom products is a shower chair that converts to a stool. It features a rustproof aluminum frame, a contoured seat that wicks away water, a removable backrest, and a built-in holder for a shower sprayer.

The Convertible Shower Chair & Stool is designed to mimic "actual furniture", and to blend with contemporary bathroom finishes and materials.

The Convertible Shower Chair & Stool has a rust-proof frame

The bath line also includes a 3-in-1 Comfort Commode that is suitable for a bedroom, living room or bathroom. It includes swing-away armrests and an extra-wide lid that enables the piece to be used as a chair.

Also in the bath line is the Raised Toilet Seat with a quick-locking mechanism that enables it to be connected and removed without the use of tools.

Raised Toilet Seat has a quick locking mechanism

For the mobility line, the team conceived the Easy Fold Travel Walker. This has two wheels and a grip that angles down toward the front, helping improve the user's posture and wrist comfort. Other features include integrated brakes and easy height adjustment, along with a foldable design.

"Its unique centre column chassis looks cool, and also facilitates easier fold, better balanced carry and easier storage," the team said.

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The other mobility aids are the C Grip Cane, which has a crescent-shaped handle, and the Folding Cane, which is easy to store and has magnets that keep it securely folded up.

In addition to being lightweight and height adjustable, both canes feature square-shaped shafts made of aluminium and two interchangeable feet. They are offered in several colours.

Easy Fold Travel Walker is a foldable zimmer frame

The healthcare products align with the spirit of Michael Graves Design, which was founded in 1964 by Graves, who died in 2015 at the age of 80.

In addition to noted architectural works such as Oregon's Portland Building, Graves designed mass consumer products for companies such as Alessi, Target and JC Penney.

The two canes in the collection are made with aluminium shafts

After Graves became paralysed in 2003 due to an infection, he adapted his Princeton, New Jersey, home for life in a wheelchair.

Graves became an advocate for accessible design and created related products, such wheelchairs and hospital furnishings. His aim was to improve healthcare and the caregiving experience through design.

They both come in a range of colours

"Michael became a passionate voice among the disabled and used the power of design to improve healthcare experiences for patients, families and clinicians," his firm said.

CVS – one of the top American pharmacies – said it selected Michael Graves Design because it was a "design for all" pioneer that was "uniquely qualified to design transformative home healthcare products".

Other medical products include Flow X by Pearson Lloyd, a stairlift for the home that is meant to be aesthetically appealing, and a lightweight wheelchair by Phoenix Instinct that uses smart technology to improve its functionality.

The photography is byCVS Pharmacy.

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Esper Hand is a prosthetic arm with "human-like dexterity"

New York-based engineering startup Esper Bionics has developed a prosthetic arm with intuitive self-learning technology that can predict intended movement faster than similar prosthetics.

Esper Hand uses an electromyography-based brain-computer interface (BCI) – a computer-based technology system that gathers brain activity or information – to trigger movement.

When the wearer wants to control the hand, their brain sends impulses to specific muscles to activate them.

Esper Hand is a prosthetic arm that can be controlled by the mind

Over 30 non-invasive sensors that connect the stump socket to the wearer's skin pick up on this muscle activity or "electrical cues" and relay the information to trigger an action in the hand.

BCIs are often used by paralysis patients to control machines with just their thoughts. Dima Gazda, co-founder of Esper Bionics claims that the arm is three times faster than many of the prosthetics currently available on the market.

It has over 30 sensors that gather information from the wearer's skin

"We sought to create a light and durable hand with human-like dexterity that learns over time and can help people with limb differences live their best lives confidently," Gazda told Dezeen.

"Inspired by the beauty of the human body and the lightness and durability of aviation technology, the self-learning robotic hand embodies elegance, functionality and endurance," she said.

"Esper Hand is three times faster in control than other hand prostheses available in the market."

These electrical cues dictate how the arm moves

Esper Hand has five movable digits and can rotate and grip in multiple ways, allowing the wearer to perform everyday tasks such as opening a bottle, driving a car, using kitchen utensils or tapping a phone screen.

The 380-gram arm is made from a combination of polyoxymethylene plastic, fluoroplastics, nylon, aluminium, steel, titan, bronze and three types different types of silicone. It comes in four sizes and five colours.

The arm comes in four sizes and five colours

To create the arm, Esper Bionics employed electromechanics, a field of engineering that merges electrical and mechanical engineering to make sure the hand can "perform all the necessary functions".

This included conducting durability tests on 3D-printed versions of the hand and adjusting its shape and size.

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"We create the design of the future hand making sure that it's as human-like as possible," said Gazda.

"We go through a series of iterations to eliminate engineering and design mistakes and choose the right materials for the final version of the product."

Esper Hand can be connected to a cloud-based platform via a smartphone

According to the company, the resulting arm is "lighter than a human hand" and at 380 grams, it is lighter than many limb prosthetics on the market.

The flexible hand has modular fingers that can form multiple common grasps including flexing, pinching fingers together, cupping and making a fist.

It also has a "special mechanism" that allows the wearer to easily disconnect the hand which can be useful for example when the wearer is changing clothes.

The arm can form multiple common grasps

Esper Bionics also created a cloud-based platform that can be connected to the arm to help improve its performance over time.

Dubbed Esper Platform, the solution can be connected to the wearer's smartphone or laptop. It collects and stores data about the user's movements, effectively "learning" what the wearer's next action will be so that it can predict movements faster.

It is made from plastic and metal

"Thanks to all the collected data, the platform updates the control algorithms of the hand so that next time the preferred grip will have a higher priority to be chosen in the same situation," explained Gazda.

"The hand perceives a certain situation to be 'the same' if it receives similar data to what it received before from all the sensors," she said.

"Ultimately, the more the wearer uses the hand, the faster it suggests the right grip."

The arm weighs just 380 grams

Gazda believes that the technology used for Esper Hand can help improve the quality of amputees' lives.

"We see assistive devices as the foundation for the future ecosystem of electronic implants which we believe have the biggest potential in unleashing human abilities, eliminating diseases and prolonging lives," she said.

Other recent prosthetics featured on Dezeen include a prosthetic leg for amputee ballet dancers by Jae-Hyun An and an exoskeleton that paralysed individuals can control with their mind creaed by researchers at Grenoble university.

The photography is courtesy ofEsper Bionics.

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Dotplot device monitors changes in breast health

Postgraduate students at the Royal College of Art have created a portable tool to help women check their breasts for abnormalities.

The handheld device, called Dotplot, is a breast health monitoring tool that uses sensing technology – a technology that uses sensors to acquire information by detecting the physical, chemical, or biological property quantities and convert them into readable signal – to build a map of the user's chest and take readings of their breast tissue.

Dotplot is a breast monitoring device

Dotplot is programmed to identify different areas around the breast in order to map the reading to a specific point, meaning that any changes in tissue density can easily be detected.

When used over a period of several months, it's able to provide month-by-month comparisons of breast tissue, helping to flag abnormalities as soon as possible. The long-term goal is to help more women detect potential breast cancer earlier.

It uses sensing technology to create a map of the user's breasts

"Our goal at Dotplot is to eliminate the confusion and misconceptions surrounding self-checks," Royal College of Arts (RCA) students Debra Babalola, Shefali Bohra, Himari Tamamura and Yukun Ge told Dezeen.

"We want women to take care of their breast health with confidence, clarity and ease," they continued.

The device can be connected to an app that guides users as they check their breasts

Women can connect the Dotplot device to an app via Bluetooth and while pressing the device to their chest, they can read a step-by-step guide on how to check each area of their breasts.

Instructions include prompting women to follow the on-screen marker to move the device across the chest to cover the entire chest.

The app provides real-time feedback and at the end of each check, it creates a report which can be compared to statistics gathered from previous months. It also reminds users to conduct a check each month.

The tool builds a map of the user's chest and takes readings of their breast tissue

The first phase of developing the device prototype involved asking a group of women of different ages how regularly and in what ways they check their breasts.

The students found that many women are confused or even scared of conducting breast self-checks, despite it being a key method in helping to detect breast cancer in its early stages. This feedback informed the final design.

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"We were surprised to hear that women who had been shown how to conduct self-checks by their general practitioners were still not 100 per cent sure that they were doing them correctly," said the designers.

"Others worry that the moment a lump is found, death is certain and this has deterred women from checking their breasts as regularly as they should, in fear of feeling a lump or abnormality."

"It highlighted that the demonstrations, pamphlets and tutorials provided for breast health care – though useful – were insufficient," they continued.

It comes in a choice of colours

The students hope that Dotplot will help prevent more cancer diagnoses while encouraging women to make a habit of checking their breasts.

"We aim to make breast health care routine and demonstrate that discovering changes in your breast tissue is not something to be feared – especially when detected in good time," they said.

"We then asked ourselves, how can we ensure that women perform these checks correctly in order to reduce the number of deaths per incidence of breast cancer?" they added.

"The good news is that early detection increases survival rates to 93 per cent, so when caught on time the prognosis is significantly improved."

The students hope that it helps more women detect cancers earlier

Babalola, Bohra, Tamamura and Ge developed Dotplot as part of studies on Innovation Design Engineering, a course run by RCA and Imperial College London.

Past designs by students at the RCA include Nat Martin's Scroll ring which enables wearers to interact with augmented reality and Brian Black's virtual-reality proposal that would give people the opportunity to drive NASA's rovers in space.

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Intricate InstaSwab by OPT Industries was designed to enable better medical testing

Advanced manufacturing company OPT Industries has used computational design techniques to create a medical swab that aims to improve clinical testing during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.

The InstaSwab is made of precisely engineered polymer fibres, each thinner than a human hair.

Five different InstaSwab models by OPT Industries

These fibres are arranged into patterns that allow the swab to morph, twist and expand more than a traditional cotton or nylon swab.

This means that the swab can absorb more fluid than regular swabs and expel it quickly when squeezed into a vial, which provides a higher sample concentration for better diagnostics, OPT Industries said.

The pattern of fibres in each bulb allows the swab to morph, twist and expand

After developing the innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, designer and researcher Jifei Ou founded OPT Industries to mass-produce the InstaSwab.

Ou was able to manufacture throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when traditional swabs were in short supply. The company believes its product is ideal for rapid diagnostic kits requiring high sample sensitivity, such as those used during the pandemic.

For Covid-19 testing, there are nasopharyngeal, mid-turbinate, anterior and saliva-based sampling swabs

"As an advanced manufacturing company, we see the value in building micro-scale technologies that solve macro-scale challenges," said OPT Industries.

"Taking inspiration from systems built by nature, these fibres can morph, twist, and transform into any pattern, capturing fluids more accurately than before and releasing samples effortlessly for testing."

OPT Industries says its product is ideal for rapid diagnostic kits

The InstaSwab comes in a range of shapes and sizes for various different kinds of testing and can be also be customised.

The Covid-19 collection, for instance, includes nasopharyngeal, mid-turbinate, anterior and saliva-based sampling swabs.

In addition to its diagnostic benefits, the company claims the Instaswab is more comfortable to use for the patient, as it has a flexible shaft and soft compressive tip that are more gentle on the nasal cavity.

To make it easy to use, the swab also has a textured handle to prevent slipping and a customisable depth indicator.

OPT Industries manufactured its swabs during the coronavirus pandemic

The handle is notched at the midpoint to allow it to be easily broken off and deposited into test vials.

OPT Industries makes the swabs using its own proprietary design software and an advanced digital manufacturing process.

The swabs can absorb and expel fluid more efficiently than traditional cotton or nylon products

The process includes optical lithography, which involves creating patterns in material using light, as well as computational optimisation and functional polymer processing.

OPT Industries is now building off InstaSwab to develop sampling solutions for environmental testing, including testing for water pollution and agricultural infestations.

The fibres of the InstaSwab are finer than a human hair

Ou's previous work at MIT has included making inflatables that fold themselves from flat sheets into complex origami and 3D-printing hair-like structures.

InstaSwab is shortlisted in the product design category of the Dezeen Awards 2021. Other designs in contention include a build-your-own football for impoverished children by Nendo and the Japanese wood-coloured Forest Crayons by Playfool.

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