IDEO has long been a pioneer of high-tech, socially-conscious industrial design. The Lifeport Organ Recovery System is no exception- providing a sleek and high-performing alternative to the usual cooler and ice, Lifeport transports organs to the 70,000+ Americans on the waiting list to receive kidney donations (not including international organ recipients and other organs). For nearly as long as organ donation has been available, organs were transported without any way to regulate or monitor their viability, and organs often would not make the journey from donation to transplantation.

In collaboration with Organ Recovery Systems, IDEO created the LifePort, a cooler with a self-contained pump that perfuses the kidney with a cold liquid solution. The kidney is housed in an egg-like unit that also monitors its viability in a clear, easy-to-read format, and is easily transported from procurement site to surgery. The same team now plans to create similar units for other organs. The device also provides critical data to monitor and evaluate kidneys during transport.

IDEO helped Organ Recovery Systems with user research, industrial, thermal, and mechanical design activities, and provided prototypes of two working systems to meet critical launch deadlines. Understanding the kidney’s journey from donation to transplantation helped the team design a product to meet the demands of the organ procurement organization, the surgeons, and the OR staff. Several iterations of component designs and careful thermal studies led to a highly compact mechanical layout. The ergonomics of system setup and the user interface were carefully considered to minimize the possibility of errors and communicate only essential information. The overall design was conceived to clearly convey the importance of the cargo and serves as a platform for a family of organ-specific transporters.

Organ Recovery Systems believes that perfusion has the potential to remove tens of thousands of patients from the waitlist and dialysis and save the healthcare system more than $1 billion annually. In 2006, the LifePort Kidney Transporter was used to transport 350 kidneys per month in 12 countries, and was included in the permanent architecture and design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

+ IDEO
+ Organ Recovery Sytems

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Health, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.