Melissa Schubert
Sr. Product UX/UI Designer
Dialysis Device
Why
Due to various causes, a person's renal system can fail. Renal failure produces several physiological derangements. The balance of water, minerals and the excretion of daily metabolic load is no longer possible and toxic end products of nitrogen metabolism (urea, creatinine, uric acid, and others) can accumulate in blood and tissue.
Kidney failure and reduced kidney function have been treated with dialysis. Dialysis removes waste, toxins and excess water from the body that normal functioning kidneys would otherwise remove. Dialysis treatment for replacement of kidney functions is critical to many people because the treatment is life saving.
Who
Peritoneal dialysis patients can do their therapy at home. While this is convenient in many ways, it also presents challenges such as making sure they're delivering their treatment as prescribed, being careful about cleanliness related to their treatment, and properly disposing of the waste.
Since they're doing dialysis at home, they have to manage their inventory of supplies for the treatment carefully so they don't run out of critical supplies. Patients administering treatment at home may have help from a care-taker, but that is not necessarily the case and many patients are taking care of their treatments on their own.
What
Regardless of the type of dialysis performed, the dialysis treatment will produce waste or effluent dialysis fluid, which is also referred to as drain fluid or “spent” dialysate.
Delivering spent dialysate to the patient's bathtub or toilet can require that long runs of tubing, which adds cost and can be a nuisance especially if the room in which therapy is performed is not close to a house drain. The drain areas of the house can also carry a large bioburden, which can be detrimental to a patient who is about to perform a sterile dialysis therapy. Drain bags collecting an entire treatment's worth of spent fluid can become heavy and difficult to move, especially for elderly patients.
How
My work on the Baxter peritoneal dialysis system is all under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Therefore, I can't share any of details of the work I did on the proprietary hardware/software. I can however, share a link to patent to give you an idea of the system I worked on. To view the patent click below.