Applying analytical hierarchy process (AHP) for intelligent medical wearable device Design estimation

• Main Authors: Chang, En-Wei, 張恩瑋
• Other Authors: Lin, TING-RU
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16408504425084277129

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 科技管理研究所 === 103 === With the rapidly growing trend of wearable technology, the development of these devices is becoming more important as technology is continuously being integrated into our daily life. International investigation firm Gartner predicted that global output of wearable technology devices will be $ 10 billion by 2016. The application potential in many different industries are limitless and of a time sensitive nature as many firms are already developing and bringing products to market. In the healthcare industry alone, the wearable technology device provides many self-management health platforms including front-end physiological parameter gathering, and back-end expert consultation. In one specific example, they are currently developing a smart phone APP, which accumulates users' physiological parameters from either intelligent wearable technology devices or manual input, and feeds it into an online cloud database, where experts such as a nutritionist can effectively offer timely feedback to the user. The main purpose of this study is to obtain critical factors regarding how new products such as intelligent medical wearable devices should be designed, based on experts’ opinions, in order to improve the customers’ acceptance of this technology, and assist in new product development from start to growth. The initial criteria of this study were based on previous smart phone design references and in-depth interviews with experts who have years of experience understanding adapted use of such medical devices by customers. We then screened the initial criteria with the Fuzzy Delphi method and used the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method to obtain critical factors with relative importance weights that can provide designers as well as business planners suggestions in the new product development stage. The result showed that the most significant dimension of intelligent wearable device in the health-care field is the "functional properties"; the second is the "style image", while the "environmental concern" has less impact. Further analysis of the factors under dimensions also showed that "the functional convenience properties" is the most important. This suggests that in addition to providing on-time measuring functions through cloud computing technology, the intelligent wearable medical device should also provide other fundamental and useful functions such as vibration warning, etc. Although our study showed that the environmental factor is not significant, we suggest that the recycling technology is worth concerned, as it could eliminate unnecessary waste or even lower related costs of the intelligent medical wearable devices. The recommendation for future research is that we can use the big data we have collected from this platform to classify customer groups, and cross analyze the results of this study with other research areas for future and varying industry analysis.