Warwick, United Kingdom and Stuttgart, Germany
The user-focused PiccoJect designed by DCA Design International for Haselmeier is an autoinjector that provides excellence through simplicity, addressing key challenges for global healthcare systems.
PiccoJect has recently been awarded a 2022 Good Design Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
It is Haselmeier’s innovative, user-focused, compact, and fully featured autoinjector platform, designed to address key challenges in healthcare.
One such challenge is the rising prevalence of chronic diseases.
Many of the most effective and promising drugs for treating these diseases are “biologics,” which are commonly delivered by injection and increasingly sub-cutaneous injection, for which PiccoJect has been specifically designed.
Another key challenge is increasing pressure on healthcare spending.
This can make the self-administration of medication attractive as it can reduce the time required from healthcare professionals and the space needed in clinics and hospitals.
However, to be effective and safe, devices intended for self-administration must be incredibly easy to use, intuitive, and low risk.
The design of PiccoJect has focused on simplifying the self-injection experience.
To deliver a dose, the user just removes the cap and presses the device against their skin.
In addition to the features expected of this type of device such as low triggering force, a fully shielded needle, and audible “clicks” indicating the start and end of injection, PiccoJect has a number of features intended to further improve usability.
The large window that surrounds the syringe makes inspection of the medication and monitoring of injection progress straightforward from a wide range of viewing angles.
Traditional autoinjectors typically require the user to determine whether a dose has been fully delivered by judging the position of features within the syringe viewing window, which users can find difficult and confusing.
To address this, PiccoJect has a novel “status indicator” that changes color when the injection is complete, providing clear ‘binary’ feedback and confidence that the dose has been delivered successfully.
The process of self-injection can be awkward and intimidating for some patients, so PiccoJect’s design has been carefully developed to address this.
The compact size and soft external form are designed to make the device less threatening, whilst the short length and wider cross-section make the device secure and comfortable to hold when delivering a dose, especially for those with impaired dexterity.
PiccoJect achieves all this whilst being uncomplicated to manufacture: where traditional autoinjectors often have more than twelve components in addition to the syringe, PiccoJect contains just eight.
This simplicity increases its versatility as a “platform” that can be easily modified for different syringe types, drug viscosities, and fill volumes.
Project: PiccoJect
Designers: DCA Design International Limited
Manufacturer: Haselmeier GmbH.
