We apply our deep expertise in science, engineering, design, and strategy across a range of industry sectors, working with organisations in complex, regulated, and fast-moving markets, whilst tailoring our product development approach to sector-specific challenges, regulations, and user needs. Supporting innovation from discovery through to commercial launch.
CDP delivers product development services powered by deep expertise in science, engineering, design, and strategy. We help clients solve complex challenges, accelerate innovation, and bring products to market through integrated capabilities spanning early discovery to commercial launch.
Introducing the World’s First ‘Touchable Memory’: A Device Shining a Light on Usher Syndrome
We are honored to announce our involvement in a remarkable awareness campaign with Cure Usher, Havas Lynx, and Push Films: the world’s first ‘touchable memory’ device.
This awareness campaign seeks to shed light on Usher syndrome, a genetic condition that causes varying degrees of hearing and sight loss from an early age. Despite its significant impact, Usher syndrome remains underrecognized, with a misdiagnosis rate of 40%, underscoring the critical need for heightened awareness and understanding.
Our collaboration on this project perfectly encapsulates our commitment to improving lives through innovation.
By developing a device to appear in the campaign film that converts sounds into tactile sensations, we enabled the campaign’s real-life sisters – Laura, who has Usher syndrome, and Hannah – to reconnect with a memory in a uniquely inclusive manner.
We invite you to watch the emotional film and explore the press release below.
https://youtu.be/SQXHR3sfoZw?feature=shared
The World’s First Touchable Memory. A Device Created To Raise Awareness About This Impairing Genetic Condition
Usher syndrome is a genetic condition that develop in children and young adults causing the loss of hearing and sight in different degrees.
Awareness of Usher is low with doctors misdiagnosing 40% of the time leading to uncertainty for families. In the UK around 11,000 people have been diagnosed with Usher, with an estimated 400,000 people worldwide.
Cure Usher Syndrome, a patient-led charity dedicated to raising awareness of Usher Syndrome, has launched its new brand awareness initiative, kicking off with an emotional short film which shows two sisters experiencing the world’s first touchable memory.
Conceived by leading global healthcare communications agency, Havas Lynx, and transformed into a real device by tech-experts, Cambridge Design Partnership, the device transforms stimuli such as sound or music, into tactile sensations. The frequency of these vibrations is adjusted for the hand’s receptors, which research shows can detect almost nothing over 1,000Hz.
The emotional short film features Laura Whitaker, a woman who has lived with Usher syndrome since a young age and her sister Hannah Stroud. It shows the real-life sisters interacting with the ‘Touchable Memory’, which allows them to experience a moment in time the same way despite Laura’s hearing and sight limitations.
In preparation for the film, Laura and Hannah undertook a series of interviews which allowed the Havas Lynx team to collate information to select a memory to hide in the device.
Not only does the device translate sounds into vibrations, but it was also designed with a specific shape, light, and colour for people with limited concentric sight.
Stuart Curtis, Engineer at Cambridge Design Partnership, said: “Results showed that skin receptors on the hands respond best to low-frequency sound and can detect almost nothing over 1,000Hz compared to our hearing which can detect 20,000Hz. With the use of surface transducers, we translated a synthetic baseline from a MIDI track, into a sensorial experience. These frequencies became physical and allowed Laura and Hannah to feel the music rather than hear it.”
Alex Okada, Chief Creative Officer at Havas Lynx, said: “Since this condition is still incurable, we had to be very careful how to raise awareness without spreading fear. The device was a way to grab attention but the emotional connection between the sisters was what made it meaningful.”
Mark Jordon and Laura Norton are Patrons at Cure Usher Syndrome, they have two young children who both have the condition. Talking about the campaign, both said: “We are proud and privileged to be joint patrons of Cure Usher, and to support this charity in raising awareness of Usher syndrome.
“The film is unbelievably powerful, I think it is going to have a huge impact in raising awareness of usher syndrome and what it means to find a cure. The human element of Laura and Hannah’s story is invaluable, and I can’t thank them enough for sharing their memories and the power that their story holds.
“A huge thanks also to Havas Lynx, Cambridge Design Partnership, and Push Films, all bringing the magical elements to make this emotional film.”
Cure Usher Syndrome is working to raise awareness, support families and raise money for vital medical research. It currently has an agreement with University College London (UCL) where donations directly fund research as part of the Institute of Ophthalmology.
How to boil your egg perfectly every time – according to simulation
Search ‘how to boil an egg’ on Google, and you get over three billion results, some telling you to put the egg in cold water after boiling to preserve the runny yolk. Intrigued, we decided to investigate the science behind this advice.
Rather than heading straight to our lab for experimentation, we used computer simulation to calculate and model the movement of heat and temperature through the egg and surrounding fluid. Simulation lets us predict data at times that would be impractical or expensive in actual experiments.
Modeling the heat flow in a boiling egg could be a surprisingly tricky problem. An egg consists of a solid shell holding the white and yolk, initially in a liquid state but solidifying as the cooking continues. Being natural products, the exact properties and sizes of eggs vary.
To simplify the problem, we found technical publications that describe the average dimensions and thermal properties of the shell, white, and yolk for a typical egg. We decided to define these properties at a temperature of 60°C, which is around the point the yolk starts to solidify. Using computer-aided-design software, we created the geometry of the egg, and defined a body of fluid to surround it. This fluid body represents the boiling water in a saucepan during the first cooking stage. Afterward, the fluid body can be used to mimic cool-down in air or a bowl of 10°C cold water. We decided that the eggs would start the process from room temperature in all cases.
We ran the simulation using powerful software, Ansys Fluent. The software was initially developed for understanding problems such as the flow of air over planes or heat in a chemical plant, but it can be applied to domestic problems such as the humble boiled egg. To allow the simulation to run quickly on an ordinary computer, we took advantage of the fact an egg shape is a body-of-revolution and looks the same however it’s rotated around its axis. This lets us model it as an axisymmetric body that the computer considers two-dimensional. This reduces the number of calculations and gives us the answer quicker and more cheaply than simulating the real-life, three-dimensional shape.
As an example of the simulation results, Figure 1 shows the temperature distribution on a slice along the egg’s axis after cooking in boiling water for six minutes. The material towards the outside has heated up close to the temperature of the water. However, the central region corresponding to the yolk is still around 50°C, corresponding to a runny egg.
Figure 1: Temperature distribution on a slice across the egg after six minutes of immersion in boiling water.
Figure 2 shows a side-by-side comparison of subsequently cooling the egg in air or 10°C water for five minutes (five minutes being our estimate of the time it takes to finish eating our first dippy egg and move on to the second). When cooled in air, the central region of the egg continues to increase to 70°C, removing the prospect of a runny egg, even though the outer region and shell have decreased in temperature. In contrast, after cooling in water, the central region stays unchanged at 50°C while the shell has decreased close to 10°C. Leaving your perfect dippy egg in air risks ruining the runny yolk – but cooling it in water may save it.
Figure 2: Temperature distribution on a slice through the egg following cooking and five minutes of cooling in (a) air and (b) water.
As well as modeling the overall temperature in the egg, we extracted the data for two specific points – at the center and the edge of the egg – and plotted them on a graph (Figure 3) to see how they differed. The data showed that the yolk’s temperature lags that at the shell. This is because the thermal diffusivity of the white and yolk are relatively low. Thermal diffusivity is a measure of how quickly heat can move through a material. So, it takes a while for the yolk to heat up, but once it does, it keeps cooking, absorbing heat from the rest of the egg material. It’s slow to respond to changes in the surrounding water (or air). The temperature just inside the shell responds much more quickly to changes, though, since the path the heat needs to travel from the surrounding fluid is considerably shorter, and the thermal diffusivity of the shell markedly higher.
Figure 3: Temperature profiles with time at the center point of the yolk (circles) and adjacent to the shell (crosses)
With the aid of some considered simplifications, we think this simulation analysis has proven the cookery expert right: cooling eggs down in cold water really does preserve the runny yolk. However, whenever you analyze a problem for the first time, it’s important to compare results against an experimental benchmark, so you can confirm the realism of the assumptions and simplifications in a computer simulation. We took three eggs and boiled each for six minutes in a lab beaker. One was opened straight away, and the other two after cooling in cold water or in air for five minutes. As predicted by our computer simulation, the yolks ranged from runny to fully cooked. And the best thing about this experiment? Everyone got an egg cooked precisely to their liking at the end.
Our engineers and designers are enthusiastic about using science to understand and improve the processes and products we use every day. Get in touch with emma.lindsey@cambridge-design.com to learn more about our work in kitchen technology or simulation.
By Cambridge Design Partnership
April 5th 2022
Reducing the carbon footprint and plastic waste of LFTs: Evidence-based opportunities
Billions of lateral flow tests have been used worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic – over two billion have been provided in the UK alone. Debate has raged on social media about why the tests need to use so much single-use plastic and how they could be made more ‘sustainable’. The test strip caseworks is a particular source of dismay – why so much plastic to house such a tiny test strip?
With the UK government ending the free distribution of lateral flow tests for the general public – citing a transition from emergency response to longer-term management of the pandemic – now is the ideal time to look more closely at the sustainability of these lateral flow tests, and to seek the data to demystify some of the emotional assumptions being made.
Familiarity with lateral flow testing has certainly increased, as has confidence in their clinical performance. It’s expected that lateral flow devices will be more present in our daily lives post-pandemic – not just for COVID-19 and pregnancy testing but to diagnose diseases such as seasonal influenza and sexually transmitted infections – all from the comfort of the home.
We’ve carried out a high-level assessment to quantify the approximate environmental impact of lateral flow tests and identify evidence-based suggestions for improving their environmental sustainability.
Why do COVID-19 lateral flow tests contain lots of single-use plastic in the first place?
The emergence of COVID-19 was a global emergency, and vast quantities of lateral flow tests were needed urgently. Once developers could produce the right immunoassay chemistry to detect the virus (SARS-CoV-2), it required implementation in a low-cost, low-risk device, that has a mature supply chain – with proven, readily available materials that wouldn’t compromise analytical or clinical performance.
This meant using existing plastic casework designs to retain and protect the nitrocellulose test strip. Plastic is robust, low cost, lightweight, easy to transport, and easily printed for QR codes and LOT numbers. Critically, it’s a consistent material proven for the highest volume manufacturing and won’t interfere with the immunoassay chemistry.
From a performance, cost, and manufacturing perspective, redesigning the product with new materials would have been high risk. Material changes may also have needed significant R&D costs, new capital equipment as well as additional cost and effort needed to demonstrate equivalence and achieve regulatory approval – risking the ability to provide sufficient numbers of high-quality tests, at speed during the pandemic.
Our results: The sustainability of lateral flow tests
But how serious an environmental impact do these tests have? To find out, we broke down a test into its constituent components and weighed them to calculate the approximate environmental impact, using standard emissions factors to calculate the carbon footprint of a single test.
We focused on carbon footprint (the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted during manufacture, transport, and disposal of the tests) and plastic waste (waste that would persist indefinitely if released into the environment) – the two issues that have attracted the most attention around lateral flow tests. A more comprehensive study should consider a broader range of environmental impacts, for example, the use of scarce resources and emission of other pollutants to avoid unintended consequences of any product changes.
Our results reveal:
The components needed to conduct the test account for around half of the carbon footprint and around two-thirds of the plastic waste. Packaging makes up most of the rest – as is often the case, a surprisingly high proportion of the total environmental impact.
The test strip caseworks, which attracts the most comment online, is responsible for around 30% of the carbon footprint and 40% of the plastic waste. While it’s the most significant single contributor to the environmental impacts we evaluated, the large number of other small parts is also significant. Focusing on the caseworks therefore might not be the best strategy for improving the sustainability of the tests overall.
Lateral flow tests a minor piece of UK healthcare’s environmental impact
To put these numbers into context, we can compare the environmental impact of the two billion COVID-19 lateral flow tests distributed in the UK with the UK healthcare system’s overall environmental impact. We estimate the UK’s lateral flow tests have a carbon footprint equivalent to around 0.5% of the total NHS carbon footprint. This isn’t a trivial amount, but it’s also not the largest single contributor to the impact of the UK health system.
It’s also worth considering the positive environmental impact of a user-administered test on the health system. Conducting a test at home can eliminate the need for an individual to visit a test site, GP’s surgery, or hospital (assuming the clinical performance of the lateral flow test is adequate). Based on estimates from the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition, one lateral flow test has around 5% of the carbon footprint of a single GP appointment and produces a similarly low percentage of non-degradable (plastic) waste.
And that’s before we consider travel. We estimate one lateral flow test has the same carbon footprint as driving 350 metres in an average UK car. So, if you’re driving yourself to a test site or GP surgery some distance away, at-home lateral flow tests compare even more favorably.
If a lateral flow test prevents an individual from transmitting COVID-19 to a vulnerable person, there’s a public health benefit – as well as an environmental benefit – to keeping people out of the hospital. We can all see the discarded waste from home tests, but the less visible impact from energy- and material-intensive medical interventions is often significantly higher.
These approximate figures demonstrate why building an evidence base is vital during product development targeting sustainability objectives – because the results can be unexpected and non-intuitive.
Quick ways to optimize today’s lateral flow tests
Just because waste from lateral flow tests might not be the most urgent sustainability issue for UK healthcare, that doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t do something about it.
We used the ‘avoid/shift/improve’ model to find potential quick wins for lateral flow tests. These reduce the carbon footprint of each test by nearly a third and the plastic waste by almost a quarter – without impacting the fundamentals of how the test works.
They include:
Eliminate waste bags. There’s a case for quickly isolating contaminated waste (even given COVID-19 also spreads from infected individuals through the air), but the bags account for around 5% of the carbon footprint of the test. It’s not clear how widely used they are in a domestic setting – there may be a risk-based justification for not including them in the test kit.
Package all the test strips in a single foil pouch. Using a single re-sealable pouch to protect the tests from ambient humidity (rather than individually packing each test in a pouch with desiccant) is common in packs of lateral flow tests designed for use by healthcare professionals. However, once opened, the stability lifetime of the remaining tests is affected.
Reduce the size of paper instructions. These are important for the effectiveness of the tests and are a regulatory requirement, but account for 5% of the carbon footprint of a test – could they be reduced in size?
Eliminate the cardboard sleeve. This packaging isn’t essential to the safe and effective functioning of the test, and it seems likely that the functions it does provide could be achieved with less material.
Prefill the extraction tubes with buffer solution. This is already done in some test kits, although manufacturers need to be conscious of moisture loss and the effect on shelf life. However, the separate plastic vial used in the test kit we studied accounts for around 5% of the carbon footprint and plastic waste.
Increase the size of the pack from seven to ten tests. This would mean less package waste per individual test. Including ten tests in one pack instead of seven reduces the carbon footprint by around 5% (depending on how many other optimizations are done at the same time). Perhaps a pack of seven tests was originally designed to cover a week of daily testing – but is that how tests are being used in practice?
Redesign of the test strip caseworks
Looking to the longer-term gets us into product redesign – creating a new generation of the product with sustainability in mind. Doing this can take significant investment since, for medical devices, it’s likely to require new regulatory approval, which is a lengthy and costly process.
A popular idea circulating for lateral flow tests is to minimize the plastic test strip caseworks (without compromising the essential functions of providing a stable platform, and protecting the nitrocellulose test strip). It might be possible to halve the caseworks mass and reduce the overall carbon footprint and plastic waste by 15-20%. This would require significant investment in R&D, production tooling, and regulatory approval hoops to jump through – but could be worthwhile if future demand for tests stays high.
Longer-term options
If we consider that the world may require billions more lateral flow tests over the coming decade, a more comprehensive redesign becomes commercially viable. This could involve stripping the design back to the fundamental requirements for a lateral flow test – flowing a sample through the test strip in a way that is controlled and free from contamination. Current designs take advantage of established components to collect, buffer, and dose the sample – but, at this production volume, it may be worthwhile designing a system from the ground up that is optimized for cost, usability, performance, and sustainability.
Sustainability as a brand differentiator
It’s clear there’s scope to optimize lateral flow tests to reduce their environmental impact – and a systematic analysis reveals options beyond those that might jump out to someone when they use the tests. But it’s essential to put the impact of lateral flow tests in the context of the wider healthcare system, to focus resources where they can have the most environmental impact – and to recognize that, sometimes, the plastic waste people can see helps to avoid more serious, but less visible consequences.
On the other hand, while visible plastic waste from lateral flow tests may not be the most pressing environmental issue facing the healthcare industry, it highlights the growing influence consumer opinion is likely to have as diagnosis and treatment shift from hospitals to homes. And as lateral flow tests become (in the UK, at least) a product people buy with their own money, choosing from a range of options, there may be a competitive advantage for businesses that take note and optimize their products for sustainability.
Featuring analysis conducted by Katie Williams, Mechanical Engineer
References
Prime Minister sets out plan for living with COVID [Internet]. GOV.UK. 2022 [cited 1 April 2022]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-plan-for-living-with-covid
The Sustainable Healthcare Coalition. Care Pathways Calculator. [Internet]. Sustainable Healthcare Coalition. 2022 [cited 1 April 2022]. Available from: https://shcoalition.org/
By Cambridge Design Partnership
June 7th 2021
Ten ways to reduce E-waste in product development
We all have that drawer – the graveyard for discarded electronics. What’s in yours? A cracked phone, an obsolete activity tracker, maybe an original iPod? You hang onto them, because it seems wrong to throw them away.
You’re right. Globally, 53.6 million metric tons of electronic waste, or E-waste, were generated in 2019 but only around one-fifth of this was recycled. Roughly half this pile comes from personal devices, which can be hard to round up from consumers.
Any product that includes some form of circuitry or electrical components is classed as electronic equipment. Once this product has been discarded without the intent to reuse, it falls under the category of E-waste.
The problem is not just environmental; in some cases it’s pragmatic. Many minerals in the products we throw away are difficult to obtain. The long-term consequences are serious. For example, a shortage of lithium or cobalt, both critical materials in electric vehicle batteries, could slam the brakes on our migration to greener transport.
As with most environmental issues, the solution to E-waste lies with government, industry, and the consumer. This article focuses on how product developers can play their part in helping to reduce e-waste.
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If devices become more modular, it becomes easier for the consumer or an engineer to perform repairs. It also makes it easier to break up devices at the end of their lives, a growing incentive if more industries become responsible for waste disposal.
Small product changes can make a significant impact, for example identifying which components tend to break first. Is there a way to make the component easily removable and replaceable? And if not, could it be designed to be more resilient?
2. Anticipate legislation
E-waste is a growing area of concern for governments, leading to a marked increase in the regulatory restrictions on disposal. This is noticeable in the electric car industry, where the EU and China have made manufacturers responsible for collecting and disposing of car batteries.
Both regulation and taxation are likely to increase. There is an opportunity for product developers to anticipate these factors when designing new products.
A generation ago, mending your own possessions was a standard solution. Commonplace electrical repairs involved a loose wire or blown fuse. Today, electronic goods are much harder to fix, not helped by moving from screws to adhesive in assembly. You can no longer replace the battery in your phone and must go to a specialized repair shop for a damaged screen – think back to that drawer of retired electronics.
Product reviews now include ratings for ease of repair. France has introduced a law requiring an index of repairability which has encouraged manufacturers to offer online fixing guides. Other EU countries are rolling this out, including a requirement for manufacturers to ensure that spares are available for up to a decade. Sweden is also reducing the VAT rate on repairs and spare parts.
The ‘Right to Repair’ is a growing consumer rights issue. Designers can reduce E-waste by making it easy to mend common faults.
4. Use recyclable materials
As materials and processing research have progressed, the range of options for easily recyclable electronics has increased. These vary from paper RFID tags and biodegradable PCB substrates to chemical methods for breaking down coatings which have traditionally complicated the recycling process. These are all options to keep in mind when starting a design.
5. Design for E-waste recycling early on
The E-waste recycling process has the potential to be very expensive, so designing with this in mind early on is vital. There is also the challenge of encouraging consumers to return their devices in the first place. It’s much more challenging to recycle post-consumer waste than materials still under the manufacturers’ control.
Material resources for electronic devices are becoming increasingly difficult to source and therefore more expensive. This highlights the benefits of setting up a ‘reverse supply chain’ in which waste products are returned to their suppliers for recycling, allowing manufacturers to extract reusable materials.
The electronics in many home appliances often only make up a tiny proportion of the product. If a more modular design is selected, it becomes far easier to separate the E-waste from the product for recycling.
6. Top the ratings
Concerns over “fast fashion” in the retail industry could easily translate into customers rejecting low-cost, short-lifetime electronic products.
A public rating system for electronics that includes ease of recycling and repair as two separate metrics would prompt brands to question their design choices. Are there other less toxic or less scarce materials that could be used instead? Are there different versions of the product with lower E-waste potential?
Eupedia, an online guide to the EU, recently combined four indices covering a range of sustainability factors to rank brands, including ratings for recycling and repair.
7. Question whether electronics are necessary
Recently, electronics with ever-increasing features have been incorporated into previously ‘dumb’ products. In many cases, this enables functionality that was previously unachievable. However, sometimes we can obtain the same advantages without electronics, leading to a lower-cost and more straightforward solution.
Designers should carefully consider the range of solutions available and weigh up the relative user benefits, costs, and environmental impacts to find the most appropriate one for their product. For a simple maximum temperature monitor, do electronics provide a unique additional benefit, or can a different type of innovation such as a chemically triggered color change give the same information to the user?
8. Partner with smart devices
The obvious way to reduce E-waste is to produce less in the first place, but is this realistic? One route is to design electronics-free devices made smart through combination with a phone app. This often allows for the same functionality with no extra electronic components. For example, in diagnostic healthcare, agriculture and food safety testing, a phone camera can read and analyze colored test strips.
9. Consider a more sustainable business model
Some companies, such as Rolls Royce jet engines, have pioneered a service business model, in which customers hire products and return them to the supplier after use. This allows the manufacturer to perform necessary repairs or replacements between hire periods. Under this model, the burden of recycling shifts back to the supplier, further encouraging them to design products with minimal E-waste.
10. Reduce material usage
Mobile phones have shrunk in size from a brick to a calculator. This has been made possible by the miniaturization of electronic components, printed circuits, and connectors. The amount of material contained within each device has reduced considerably, even though complexity has increased.
Moving from milling and other subtractive manufacturing technologies to molding and 3D printing has reduced waste. There are opportunities to mirror these changes in electronics. Instead of making a flat sheet of copper and then dissolving most of it to produce a printed circuit board, additive techniques such as printed electronics can lay down patterns of conductors and insulators only where they are needed.
Putting E-waste in context
Our customers want smaller, lighter, longer-lasting devices that are easy to recycle. We can take all these factors into account every time we create a new design.
As we mentioned in a previous article, solutions to E-waste must be looked at in the unique context of a product’s market and usage.
If we follow rules such as the above, we will make the optimum use of our planet’s limited material resources, and lay the electronics graveyard drawer to rest.
Which improvements will you design into your next electronic product?
