A design with heart: CAD tools and a collaborative effort bring a new medical design to life.(Medical Viz/CAB)

On the whole, product designers enjoy their work--after all, it's fun to create a sleek new cover for an electronics device or all innovative children's toy. But their job gets even more satisfying when they're able to design something that makes the world a better place by saving lives. Such was the case for the designers at Strategix Vision, a product design and development company based in Bozeman, Montana, when they were asked to develop a device to make heart surgery safer and less invasive.

That device, the Embrace Heart Stabilizer, holds the heart and coronary artery in position during coronary bypass surgery, allowing a surgeon to bypass the blocked artery without having to stop the heart and maintain the patient on a heart-lung machine. The procedure is therefore less risky and invasive, and makes for a shorter recovery time for the patient. What's particularly special about the Embrace is its minimalist design, which offers the surgeon more room to work as well as better overall access to the chest cavity.

Strategix Vision developed the Embrace in conjunction with strategic product development company Herbst LaZar Bell, which provided human factors analysis and other design input, as well as with CardioVations, a division of Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson company. The device is now marketed by CardioVations.

Laying the Groundwork

Strategix Vision employs industrial designers, mechanical and electrical engineers, and user researchers who work together to design and develop medical, industrial, scientific, and consumer products. The company had already designed numerous medical devices, such as a defibrillator and an apparatus for managing urinary incontinence, when it began collaborating with CardioVations a few years ago.

About a year before work on the Embrace even began, the two companies cooperated with each other on designs for a different heart stabilizer, using design software from SolidWorks for initial form and mechanical studies, as well as for review. This project went as far as the creation of working prototypes that were reviewed by cardio-thoracic surgeons.

When the Embrace project came along, much of the groundwork had already been laid, both in terms of tools and in inter-company communications. "It was a natural progression for us," says Kent Swendseid, design director for Strategix Vision, who notes that having an already-established relationship and a common semantic design and usability language with CardioVations made the whole Embrace project run more smoothly. "We just had to apply everything we had learned previously to a different and explicit technology. It was like writing a story in which we had set the scene and now were introducing a new character."