Tourniquet
Next Gen Military and Civilian Tourniquet
Challenge
This tourniquet is the most widely used tourniquet in the world. It is standard issue in every US military medical kit and used by every firefighter, policeman, and EMT.
The design of this tourniquet, however, has not changed in over three decades. The company came to IDEO to help them imagine what the next gen tourniquet could be.
Outcome
The goals for this project were to create a next gen tourniquet with an eye toward
- Reducing size
- Reducing application time
- Reducing manufacturing complexity
After countless iterations, user testing with soldiers and first responders, and rigorous performance evaluation we developed a new product architecture that is in the final stages of tooling design.
We started this project by going wide and creating a range of divergent concepts inspired by everything from ratchet straps to guitar clamps. This is only a small subset of the hundreds of prototypes that we built and tested.
This is an example of just one of our early sacrificial concepts. I used the ratchet mechanism from a small multitool to allow users to wind up the band incrementally without it unspooling if the rod slipped out of their hand. It was ultimately cut due to the increased cost of adding a metal ratchet component to the device.
This early sacrificial concept had two interesting components to it. One was a tension activated cam buckle that allowed users to quickly apply a large amount of pressure to the limb by simply pulling on the loose end of the strap. The second was the use of a Boa Dial to fully occlude (cut off blood flow) to the limb. The concept was ultimately cut due to concerns around the Boa Dial durability in sandy conditions.
A large part of this project involved figuring out how to test and evaluate different tourniquet concepts. We started off by using a blood pressure cuff wrapped around a foam roller in order to evaluate the amount of pressure each concept could apply. We eventually moved to an artificial limb developed by the US military with a 2D pressure sensor array that allowed us to capture pressure spikes along the cross section of the band.
We also conducted dozens of interviews with soldiers and first responders in order to get their feedback. The left is a clip from an interview with a SWAT commander and the right is one of the concepts going through adverse conditions testing, in this case mud.
This was one of the concepts that made it through to final testing. It featured a single pass through tension activated buckle that allowed the user to get a high limb pressure just by pulling on the strap. It was ultimately cut in favor of Velcro because users perceived the Velcro to be more reliable.
This was the final concept that is currently being tooled for production. It features a Velcro outer band that allows users to apply the initial preload to the band and a new inner band architecture that allows for faster pressure build on the limb and easy assembly in the factory.
These are images from the first production run of the new concept. These units were sent out to users and distributors for final evaluation and testing.
