Treating Kidney Failure
The American Society of Nephrology in collaboration with the User-Centered Design Team at Sunrise Labs recently released the Kidney Health Initiative’s Human Centered Design Toolkit for Kidney Failure.
Changing a person with kidney failure is the purpose of kidney replacement therapy innovations. To do that, product developers need to understand the stories they are trying to change. Human centered design is a tool for gleaning needs and problem statements from consumer stories and integrating them into the design of products. The Human Centered Design Toolkit for Kidney Failure is based on up-front research to provide guidance to medical device manufacturers in the kidney disease space. The toolkit focuses on the end user’s needs and hardships rather than what medical technologies can do. This helps bring the focus back to human centered problems rather than technical performance.
Please contact ASN Artificial Kidney Product Specialist Zach Cahill at zcahill@asn-online.org with any questions about this project.
Thanks to Alex Therrien and his team for helping to put this together. They represent the expertise the kidney community needs to get innovations closer to commercialization and build products patients will adopt.
The American Society of Nephrology (ASN) represents more than 21,000 kidney health professionals working to help people with kidney diseases and their families.
The Kidney Health Initiative (KHI)‘s mission is to catalyze innovation and the development of safe and effective patient-centered therapies for people living with kidney diseases.