# Inside Physio-Control's Design Assurance Labs



## Physio Control (Jan 28, 2013)

Ever wonder what goes into making Physio-Control devices LIFEPAK TOUGH? It can be brutal. Take a look inside the Physio-Control Design Assurance Labs: http://www.physio-control.com/Blogdetails.aspx?id=2147486583&blogid=2147483793.


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## Christopher (Feb 11, 2013)

Pretty neat stuff, thank you for sharing!


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## mycrofft (Feb 11, 2013)

*Line People Feedback Warning*

When a vendor to my work came to get feedback from the staff, our supervisors and director were allowed to stay in the room. We just shut up and nodded yes top everything positive. Send people to find out firsthand without the companies cherrypicking your contacts or sitting on them like that.


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## Veneficus (Feb 11, 2013)

Earlier in life I worked at a high end bicycle shop. One of the things that really made it fun was when vendors would show up with stuff and say "break this and I'll be back in a few weeks to find out how you did it."

Enthusiastically. For free.


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## Christopher (Feb 11, 2013)

Veneficus said:


> Earlier in life I worked at a high end bicycle shop. One of the things that really made it fun was when vendors would show up with stuff and say "break this and I'll be back in a few weeks to find out how you did it."
> 
> Enthusiastically. For free.



I would say our #1 failures with cardiac monitors are cable related. #2 are printer related. #3 battery related (was previously #1 until we moved to a newer brand with better batteries).

Rarely do we have drop related failures.


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## Veneficus (Feb 11, 2013)

Christopher said:


> I would say our #1 failures with cardiac monitors are cable related. #2 are printer related. #3 battery related (was previously #1 until we moved to a newer brand with better batteries).
> 
> Rarely do we have drop related failures.



I agree with cables. They need to be self winding and much tougher.Possibly with redundant wiring in the housing and especially mobile at the connections. Those 90+ degree turns just murder them.

I would switch 3 and 2. Batteries are a big problem, not when they are new, but after some months.


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## Christopher (Feb 11, 2013)

Veneficus said:


> I agree with cables. They need to be self winding and much tougher.Possibly with redundant wiring in the housing and especially mobile at the connections. Those 90+ degree turns just murder them.



I would not shed a tear if they made them larger gauges (probably 22ga currently? 2 ohm for ~1m wire length sounds right for the cables we carry) which would conceivably increase their lifetime.



Veneficus said:


> I would switch 3 and 2. Batteries are a big problem, not when they are new, but after some months.



I would definitely agree that batteries follow a different failure statistics than the other equipment (i.e. not bathtub shaped, more linear).


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## NomadicMedic (Feb 11, 2013)

Veneficus said:


> I agree with cables. They need to be self winding and much tougher.Possibly with redundant wiring in the housing and especially mobile at the connections. Those 90+ degree turns just murder them.
> 
> I would switch 3 and 2. Batteries are a big problem, not when they are new, but after some months.



The new LiOn batteries in the LP15 are excellent. We get several shifts out of two batteries and I've worked an arrest with 15+ 360j shocks, only partially depleted one battery.


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## Christopher (Feb 11, 2013)

n7lxi said:


> The new LiOn batteries in the LP15 are excellent. We get several shifts out of two batteries and I've worked an arrest with 15+ 360j shocks, only partially depleted one battery.



We've seen similar with both Zoll and Philips LiOn batteries.

The move to LiOn makes a huge difference in crew "happiness" at shift trade. I can remember carrying 6-8 batteries with our old monitors because we'd run thru that many in 24 hours.


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## Aidey (Feb 11, 2013)

Veneficus said:


> I agree with cables. They need to be self winding and much tougher.Possibly with redundant wiring in the housing and especially mobile at the connections. Those 90+ degree turns just murder them.
> 
> I would switch 3 and 2. Batteries are a big problem, not when they are new, but after some months.



Screw self winding. Get rid of them completely. Put RFID chips in the electrodes and build a receiver into the monitor. 

But realistically, yes. Cable failure is a PITA.


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## Christopher (Feb 11, 2013)

Aidey said:


> Screw self winding. Get rid of them completely. Put RFID chips in the electrodes and build a receiver into the monitor.
> 
> But realistically, yes. Cable failure is a PITA.



As a minor point, RFID is a passive ID tool, but that doesn't change your ultimate point that the cable housings themselves should be "wireless". How they achieve that should largely be up to the engineers. I'd ask for open standard Bluetooth.

However, you do run into an interesting issue as to defibrillation energies traveling into those cables/transmitters. Also, with the A/D converters being outside the monitor itself, you may lose some of the driving ability of the device to perform noise cancellation. I'm sure these companies have electrical engineers far smarter than I am (nb: I have no EE talent) who could/can/did solve these possible issues.


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## NomadicMedic (Feb 11, 2013)

As an aside, I'd love to see a Bluetooth link to enter patient data. Using the "wheel of death" to enter names and incident numbers is soooo 1980s. It's reminiscent of entering your name in the high score list on PacMan.


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## mycrofft (Feb 11, 2013)

Christopher said:


> I would say our #1 failures with cardiac monitors are cable related. #2 are printer related. #3 battery related (was previously #1 until we moved to a newer brand with better batteries).
> 
> Rarely do we have drop related failures.



Forgot pseudofailures. Users thrown out the manual, don't understand it; customers don't train their staff, so they either abuse it, or accidentally damage it, or give up and put it in a closet.

Otherwise, agreed 100% above. Your brand was generally of good quality weven if my agency kept buying odd models (old, missing some features, unique paper etc).


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## RocketMedic (Feb 27, 2013)

I would love to have a dynamic 12-lead capability on the LP-15.
Also, fix your modems please! Is there any particular reason that they need the blood of a virgin rabbit to transmit? Why can't they just be Verizon or T-mobile 4G and send the information as an email attachment?


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## socalmedic (Mar 1, 2013)

If it were easy, you wouldnt need to buy rescuenet.


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