Becton Dickinson SafetyGlide Needle

BD defined the medical product design challenge as follows: to invent a new hypodermic safety needle that could be made absolutely safe, post injection, without training and using only one hand. And, by the way, it could not infringe on the 200 prior patents and had to have 5 parts or fewer. This medical product design project began with competitive product design review and significant in-hospital observation and interviews with nurse technicians and phlebotomists.

Imagine
Multiple medical product design concepts were generated and tested with trained medical personnel. The folding living hinge, over center spring deployment design shown was selected. It uses only three parts and has been granted patents. As with any medical product design process, we enrolled users throughout to ensure that as the product design evolved, we were still gathering input to improve the product design.

Implement
Bresslergroup worked with BD's internal medical product design team through engineering development of the unit, and into production, through multiple rounds of medical user testing and final clinical assessment.

Impact
In formal medical product design testing the new product had a 99% usability rating, meaning that 99% of medical users tested were able to deduce how to deploy the safety feature within 2 seconds post injection. This was the best testing score of any new medical product design brought to market by BD. This medical product has been extremely successful, with estimated annual sales nearing 25 million units per year. The SafetyGlide Needle won several design awards and the Product Design and Development Magazine Gold Award.