The First CIRP Conference on Biomanufacturing Hip prosthesis design . Market analysis , new perspectives and an innovative solution

Life expectancy and quality raise have increased the request of better and customized solutions for patients. On the other side, while the health care market is continuously raising, the manufacturing industry, specially the automotive one, is facing a strongly negative trend under production and sales point of view. In this panorama, the development of biomedical devices represents a big th care and manufacturing industry being an interesting opportunity for investments. In order to design a new product, it is necessary to take into account the market needs and requests, especially when it is high-tech and involves human needs. Unfortunately, it often happens that the languages and research approaches of the parts involved in the market, supply and demand, are different which makes the communication more difficult, especially when Medicine and Engineering are involved. For example, requirements such as biocompatibility, life service or biological integration have to be translated in terms of material, manufacturing process or treatment. In order to correlate performance characteristics and design choice, tools like QFD (Quality Function Deployment) are available. In particular, they use results of market investigations on existing products and market requests to identify the improvement areas, to correlate them with design specifications so outlining the features of new products able to satisfy the market requests. Within this approach, the present paper shows the results of a market analysis focused on hip prosthesis improvement. Therefore, using questionnaires sent to specialized physicians and medical centers, it was possible to collect information about pro and cons of table, it was possible to design new concepts of the prosthesis stem which are here described and their mechanical resistance was tested using FEM simulations. © 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Professor Mamoru Mitsuishi and Professor Paulo Bartolo