Smart Response Pump

Direct Healthcare Services (DHS) manufacture and provide pressure area care solutions, with a portfolio of innovative, award-winning products including mattresses, cushions and overlays. When they sought to design and develop their own pump to power the mattresses, they wanted it to provide the greatest value to patients and their care team as possible.

PDR brought this plan to life, designing and prototyping the Smart Response Pump, with a design and functionality like no other product on the market.

Smart Response Pump - Direct Healthcare Services (DHS) from PDR on Vimeo.

The in-house combination of new product development, physical prototyping and interactive prototyping allowed us to bring the physical form together with interactive elements that would demonstrate the devices expected functionality, including smart-phone connection and remote access to the pump settings.

The prototype pump and mattress system was created using a combination of a Raspberry Pi running a python script, a supplementary Arduino microcontroller, radio frequency plugs and a smartphone app written in Nativescript. Utilising these technologies made it possible to create realistic interactions that used on-product buttons to communicate wirelessly with a smartphone app, resulting pressure changes in a mattress and LED indicators on the pump itself.

The speed at which PDR was able to deliver the project allowed DHS to gather market feedback on a product that looked and acted just as the real thing would whilst attending an industry event.