7. There’s a need to adopt virtual prototyping

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a new focus on medtech innovation, particularly in areas like respiratory therapy, where innovation had been limited. The shutdown also demonstrated that medtech innovation that relies heavily on an in-person “build-test-fail” approach leaves companies vulnerable if employees can’t make it to work.

Mark Burchnall of Stress Engineering Services in Cincinnati said the remote work required by many companies only strengthened the case for computational modeling that uses virtual prototypes rather than actual ones.

“You’re not going to eliminate the need for prototyping,” Burchnall said. “But you can learn a lot in a virtual model, and you can do a lot of iterations virtually as long as the model is credible. This is a really huge area in the medical device industry that has been exposed.”

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