Role of Reliability Engineering in Robust Design of Medical Equipment

Manufacturers of medical devices have to meet demanding needs with speed, accuracy, precision and safety. Medical equipment embraces all branches of engineering and technology, including mechanical, electrical, electronics, imaging, computers (hardware and software), communications and networking, etc. Each engineering branch has its own technological challenges and integrating each of the facets of engineering for an innovative, successful, safe, reliable and quality medical product delivered on time to the market is a great accomplishment and critical to success.

GE Healthcare, world leaders in Medical Diagnostics and Life Sciences, utilizes technology in every facet of product development. This session will discuss the role of reliability engineering in the robust design of medical equipment by GE Healthcare and will touch upon the following areas:

• The challenges in building an efficient reliability model to represent the real-life application.
• Capturing reliability needs from software, hardware and mechanical engineering perspectives.
• The relationship of reliability with other methodologies such as Design for Safety (SFMEA), Design for Manufacturing and HALT and HAST methodologies adopted to determine product/subsystem reliability.
• Determining software robustness through reliability cycling.

This presentation also covers some examples from the reliability practices in GE Healthcare and addresses product reliability through the eyes of a customer.

Key Words: Reliability Engineering, Robust Design, Medical Equipment

 

Mukund Parthasarathy GE Healthcare