Design Decision Support System toward Environmental Sustainability in Reusable Medical Equipment

Related to the recent issues on the environmental sustainability, the attention and importance of Reusable Medical Equipment (RME) has increased rapidly. As a part of System Redesign Project funded by Veterans Engineering Resource Center (VERC), “Design Evaluation for Reusable Medical Equipment” project has been conducted. This research project aims to develop new RME design assessment and evaluation framework and Design for Reusability (DFR) and Design for Sustainability (DFS) principles. In this paper, we will present a decision support system for RME design evaluation, based on DFR and DFS principles. To illustrate the proposed new framework, GI endoscope is used in this research. In the proposed system, we apply a Rough Set Theory to identify the relationships among design and reprocessing features. Also we use feature selection technique to select the customized features from the design features and reprocessing features to be used for design evaluation.