Medical industrial design refers to the utilization of arts and designing creativity and skills in conjunction with the identification of the needs in the medical field toward the creation of useful products. Indeed, the types of medical industrial design are only limited to the imagination and the creativity of the talented professionals in the field of medical industrial design. Sometimes the professionals are simply involved in the field of industrial design as a whole, and they may be approached by clients in the medical field to help them develop specific products to be utilized in the performance of their duties. At other times, the industrial designers might simply use their initiative to develop their own version of existing devices and products used in the practice of medicine and related fields.
An example of a type of medical industrial design is the production of medical disposables, such as plastic sponge holders. Disposable sponge holders are applied to a great variety of functions in the medical field. They normally have jagged teeth, grips and some form of mechanism for locking them. These products are used to hold swabs for cleaning out infections, during surgery to mop up excess body fluids, and for other functions. The exact look and feel of this type of disposable medical product and others will be determined by the medical industrial design team, on their own or in conjunction with any outside party with which they are working.
Another type of industrial medical design is the design of medical devices. These types of products are many and depend on the particular one the medical industrial design team is working on at the time. They include such products as uncomplicated tongue depressors to the more complicated designs like computerized pacemakers. The company may generate its own designs through its own creativity and industriousness, or it may work in conjunction with other parties.
Industrial medical design may be initiated by inventors with ideas for products who approach a design company with their inventions. The inventors may work with the medical design team in a sort of partnership. It could also be a more limited kind of relationship where the designers simply produce the medical item to the specification of the inventor, who may pay them for the production while retaining the full rights and patent to the product. For example, a surgeon may approach such designers to help in the production of an item that will make a particular aspect of surgery easier.