Do Medical Device Designers Need to Care about Life Cycle Assessment?

Biocompatibility, safety, cost and functionality usually constitute the mitigating factors in material choices for medical device design. Life cycle assessment has evolved over the past few years as a reliable technique to measure various environmental factors such as energy usage, carbon footprint, water and air damage among others at every stage of a product’s development to delivery. In the recent past, a lot of stress is being placed on sustainability in product design and usage across the world.

 In medical device design, the patient’s safety and health are foremost as decisive factors. Even the re-use of sterilized medical devices is controversial, not just for business reasons, but also due to concerns for safety. It will however be impossible to ignore sustainability as a mitigating factor in future design considerations. There will be ample pressure, ranging from consumer demand, regulatory demands and from competition.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can be used as a tool in material choices for medical devices to include sustainability as a material selection factor. Within the framework of available, proven, biocompatible materials that are safe, the principles of LCA can be used to make medical devices more sustainable. While the material choices themselves may allow for limited changes, it is possible to make appropriate decisions that affect the sourcing, manufacturing, packaging and disposal stages of a medical device based on LCA data for a given material.

The paper will provide a framework based on LCA specific to medical devices that will demonstrate opportunities to make and alter decisions geared towards maximizing product sustainability. Software options, data sourcing and availability and the reliability of life cycle inventory data will be discussed.