Applications of MBE for Healthcare Part 4 – Designing Medical Devices

One area in the biomedical and healthcare domain where MBSE has made significant progress is in medical device design and manufacture. At the same time, device suppliers use modern PLM (product lifecycle management) and CAD (computer-aided design) like other organizations engaged in complex engineering problems. The first figure below shows the SysML structural decomposition of an Infusion Pump, a medical device that meters out the drug into the patient catheter. Syndeia can be used to generate a PLM BOM (bill of materials) for either peristaltic or syringe pump variants. The two models remain connected for comparison and updating as the project develops. The same transformation can be performed in reverse, taking subsystem data managed in PLM for sensors, motors, etc. and using it to create new SysML blocks to be used in next generation system development.

Syndeia can also facilitate the connection between the system engineer and the CAD designer. In one use case, it connects geometry values in a 3D parametric CAD model to value properties in SysML, allowing changes in CAD design to update the SysML model for evaluating their impact on meeting system requirements.

Our recent whitepaper Applications of MBE for Healthcare (download link) describes these use cases and others in greater detail. Our fifth blog post on this topic will deal with MBE and project management.

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Decomposition of Infusion Pump Variants within the Drug Delivery System domain

Decomposition of Infusion Pump Variants within the Drug Delivery System domain

CAD model (right) is linked to SysML model of Syringe, linked to requirements verification

CAD model (right) is linked to SysML model of Syringe, linked to requirements verification

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Dirk Zwemer

Dr. Dirk Zwemer (dirk.zwemer@intercax.com) is President of Intercax LLC (Atlanta, GA), a supplier of MBE engineering software platforms like Syndeia and ParaMagic. He is an active teacher and consultant in the field and holds Level 4 Model Builder-Advanced certification as an OMG System Modeling Professional.