From complexity to confidence.
make waves//
The hardware managed the risk.
Trust was earned at the screen.
Active clinical use
Still in hospitals. Still in use.
Speed to clearance
From brief to 510(k) in fourteen months.
(the condition)
Sequential compression therapy exists to prevent Deep Vein Thrombosis [DVT]. The therapy worked.
Keeping it running was the problem.
Garment configuration was easy to get wrong.
Alarm states were hard to read under pressure.
Therapy got interrupted, misconfigured, or abandoned when the day got busy, because the controller demanded more than the moment allowed.
The brief: redesign the controller for the full clinical journey.
Operating room. Recovery. Ward. Transfer.
Where therapy needed to continue past the hospital door, the device had to travel with the patient. A specialist would not be at the bedside for every interaction.
I was engaged by Farm Product Development, a New Hampshire consultancy, as their embedded UI and interaction design lead. I worked directly with Covidien Kendall's engineering and clinical teams while Farm focused on industrial design and mechanical engineering.
My scope was the controller interface: interaction architecture, screen states, alarm logic, symbols and icon system, garment detection workflows, and the full UI specification for software development handoff.
A compression cycle is the smallest unit of the device.
It repeats thousands of times a shift.
Trust isn't established at setup. It's re-earned every cycle.
And one confusing cycle spends it.
(the diagnosis)
The controller was a mechanism.
Pumps, valves, tubing, housing.
The interface had a different job.
It was the only part of the device that spoke.
A clinician touches the interface across a shift, in rooms with variable light and no time. Every claim the program made about safety and clinical fit would be settled there.
The display was the most constrained surface in the device. An industrial-grade resistive touchscreen: pressure to register input, low resolution, narrow contrast, limited viewing angle. The right choice for gloved hands in wet environments. It set hard limits on touch targets, spacing, and how much information a single screen could safely carry.
The device's most consequential surface had the least capability.
This was a material constraint, understood in the way an industrial designer understands the properties of a polymer before specifying wall thickness. Not a limitation to design around. A property to design from.
Three disciplines shared the program, each with its own vocabulary. Resolution meant one thing to a designer, another to a software engineer, a third to an electrical engineer.
Intent that could not be specified would not survive the handoff. It would be interpreted.
(the work)
Interaction architecture
Use scenarios, garment configurations, alarm conditions, fault states, and recovery paths were mapped as one system. Screen architecture translated that logic into use, within the physical limits of the display and the realities of one-handed clinical operation.
State and symbol system
Setup, garment detection, service, alarm, and patient-focused states were made legible at a glance. Each foreseeable fault had a response and a path back to therapy.
Implementation specification
Screen states, transitions, symbols, alarm hierarchies, and interaction logic were documented for direct software-development handoff, with little room for interpretation.
(the proof)
The Kendall SCD 700 received FDA 510(k) clearance in 2010, fourteen months from brief.
A newer platform, the Kendall SCD SmartFlow, has since entered the market. The 700 series remains in active deployment alongside it, in hospitals and professional care settings.
The interface became part of the product definition: documented and preserved. Usability was built into the product rather than layered on top.
Fifteen years in use is what trust looks like.
The specification documented every screen element, symbol, animation frame, coordinate, font, and hex value required to carry the interface through implementation. Farm later asked me to teach the method to their staff.
The visual language was built to be extended. It persists in current marketing for the SmartFlow, a platform launched years after the program ended.
Complexity stayed in the device. Confidence went to the clinician.
(the evidence)
