2013 Galleries

The Spark Gallery pages are one of our most popular design destinations, with thousands of visitors each year. Check out some of the latest Spark entries, in the galleries below.

iovera

Winner - Platinum

Competition: Spark:Product
Designer: LUNAR
Design Type: Medical
Company / Organization / School: myoscience
Website: http://www.lunar.com/
Team Members: Jonathan Mendoza, Jeff Servaites, Patrick Summers, Jesse Rosen, Punit Govenji, CA Hinton, Dave Bradley

myoscience developed Focused Cold Therapy, a technology that uses only the power of cold to temporarily inhibit nerve conduction. The design team worked with myoscience to help humanize the technology to create iovera?. The physician will locate the target nerve and insert the micro-needles. Then, with the push of a button, the system cools the needles to draw heat from the surrounding tissue forming a precise zone of cold. This temporarily disables the nerve, but preserves the nerve structure where the nerve reliably re-grows over time in its original path. It works equally well on sensory and motor nerves and potentially may be used to address a wide range of clinical applications including reduction in the appearance of wrinkles, muscular disorders and pain therapy. Potential applications include treatment for pain from arthritis or other peripheral nerve conditions and treating facial lines. The main challenge was to design and engineer a beautiful, compelling, and user-centric hand held device to entice practitioners and patients to take advantage of myoscience’s aesthetic and pain-reducing technology. The Handpiece had to fit comfortably in the physician’s hand and be operated intuitively with a single button. It was also important to create a technology platform on which other devices could be developed in order to offer additional future applications. With iovera?, myoscience sought to avoid the use of a large, unwieldy tank of cryogen. This challenge was solved by using a small cryogen cartridge commonly used in other applications such as whip-cream bottles.