The Commonality Differentiation Index Using Prominence of Visual Information for Medication Package Family Planning

Author(s):  
Steven B. Shooter ◽  
Shane W. Cohen

Consumable products such as medications rely on the package or label to represent the contents. Package confusion has been widely recognized as a major problem for both over-the-counter and pharmacy-dispensed medications with potentially lethal consequences. It is critical to identify a medication as a member of a product family and differentiate its contributing elements based on visual features on the package or label. Indices that indicate degrees of commonality and differentiation of features for platforms have been shown to benefit development of engineered product families. It is possible to take a similar approach for visual features in packaging such as typography, shape/form, imagery and color. This paper establishes a commonality/differentiation index for prominence of visual features on over-the-counter and pharmacy-dispensed medications based on size and location of features. It provides a quantitative measure to assist package designers in evaluating alternatives to satisfy strategic goals and improve safety. The index is demonstrated with several medications that have been identified by the Institute for Safe Medication Practice as commonly confused.

2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ping Du ◽  
Erin F. MacDonald

Consumers' product purchase decisions typically involve comparing competing products' visual features and functional attributes. Companies strive for “product differentiation” (Liu et al., 2013, “Product Family Design Through Ontology-Based Faceted Component Analysis, Selection, and Optimization,” ASME J. Mech. Des., 135(8), p. 081007; Thevenot and Simpson, 2009, “A Product Dissection-Based Methodology to Benchmark Product Family Design Alternatives,” ASME J. Mech. Des., 131(4), p. 041002; Kota et al., 2000, “A Metric for Evaluating Design Commonality in Product Families,” ASME J. Mech. Des., 122(4), pp. 403–410; Orfi et al. 2011, “Harnessing Product Complexity: Step 1—Establishing Product Complexity Dimensions and Indicators,” Eng. Econ., 56(1), pp. 59–79; and Shooter et al. 2005, “Toward a Multi-Agent Information Management Infrastructure for Product Family Planning and Mass Customisation,” Int. J. Mass Customisation, 1(1), pp. 134–155), which makes consumers' product comparisons fruitful but also sometimes challenging. Psychologists who study decision-making have created models of choice such as the cancellation-and-focus (C&F) model. C&F explains and predicts how people decide between choice alternatives with both shared and unique attributes: The shared attributes are “canceled” (ignored) while the unique ones have greater weight in decisions. However, this behavior has only been tested with text descriptions of choice alternatives. To be useful to designers, C&F must be tested with product visuals. This study tests C&F under six conditions defined by: The representation mode (text-only, image-only, and image-with-text) and presentation (sequentially or side-by-side) of choice alternatives. For the products tested, C&F holds for only limited situations. Survey and eye-tracking data suggest different cognitive responses to shared text attributes versus shared image features: In text-only, an attribute's repetition cancels its importance in decisions, while in images, repetition of a feature reinforces its importance. Generally, product differences prove to attract more attention than commonalities, demonstrating product differentiation's importance in forming consumer preferences.


Author(s):  
Javier P. Gonzalez-Zugasti ◽  
Kevin N. Otto ◽  
John D. Baker

Abstract A platform is the set of elements and interfaces that are common to a family of products. We have previously presented a method for designing product families based on platforms that quantifies performance and cost metrics. That approach allows a team of engineers to design and evaluate candidate platforms, given perfect understanding of the designs and requirements. In this paper we present a model to account for uncertainty present during the development of those product families. Real options concepts are introduced to model the risks and delayed decision benefits present under uncertainty in technologies, funding, etc. We develop a quantitative measure of the value to the company for different family designs, and apply it to select the most appropriate design from the possible alternatives. An application to the design of platform-based families of spacecraft is shown. Results from the models indicated the platforms that were most valuable to the company under different scenarios, as well as the sensitivity of the value of each design to different uncertainty factors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Juliane Kuhl ◽  
Andreas Ding ◽  
Ngoc Tuan Ngo ◽  
Andres Braschkat ◽  
Jens Fiehler ◽  
...  

Personalized medical devices adapted to the anatomy of the individual promise greater treatment success for patients, thus increasing the individual value of the product. In order to cater to individual adaptations, however, medical device companies need to be able to handle a wide range of internal processes and components. These are here referred to collectively as the personalization workload. Consequently, support is required in order to evaluate how best to target product personalization. Since the approaches presented in the literature are not able to sufficiently meet this demand, this paper introduces a new method that can be used to define an appropriate variety level for a product family taking into account standardized, variant, and personalized attributes. The new method enables the identification and evaluation of personalizable attributes within an existing product family. The method is based on established steps and tools from the field of variant-oriented product design, and is applied using a flow diverter—an implant for the treatment of aneurysm diseases—as an example product. The personalization relevance and adaptation workload for the product characteristics that constitute the differentiating product properties were analyzed and compared in order to determine a tradeoff between customer value and personalization workload. This will consequently help companies to employ targeted, deliberate personalization when designing their product families by enabling them to factor variety-induced complexity and customer value into their thinking at an early stage, thus allowing them to critically evaluate a personalization project.


eLife ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Larderet ◽  
Pauline MJ Fritsch ◽  
Nanae Gendre ◽  
G Larisa Neagu-Maier ◽  
Richard D Fetter ◽  
...  

Visual systems transduce, process and transmit light-dependent environmental cues. Computation of visual features depends on photoreceptor neuron types (PR) present, organization of the eye and wiring of the underlying neural circuit. Here, we describe the circuit architecture of the visual system of Drosophila larvae by mapping the synaptic wiring diagram and neurotransmitters. By contacting different targets, the two larval PR-subtypes create two converging pathways potentially underlying the computation of ambient light intensity and temporal light changes already within this first visual processing center. Locally processed visual information then signals via dedicated projection interneurons to higher brain areas including the lateral horn and mushroom body. The stratified structure of the larval optic neuropil (LON) suggests common organizational principles with the adult fly and vertebrate visual systems. The complete synaptic wiring diagram of the LON paves the way to understanding how circuits with reduced numerical complexity control wide ranges of behaviors.


Author(s):  
Julian Redeker ◽  
Philipp Gebhardt ◽  
Thomas Vietor

Abstract Incremental Manufacturing is a novel manufacturing approach where product variants are manufactured based on a finalization of pre-produced parts through additive and subtractive manufacturing processes. This approach allows a multi-scale production with the possibility to scale product variants as well as the production volume. In order to ensure high economic efficiency of the manufacturing concept, there is a need for pre-produced parts that come as close as possible to the final variant geometries to ensure that only variant-specific features need to be added by additive or subtractive manufacturing steps. Furthermore, to ensure high economies of scale, a high degree of commonality should be ensured for the pre-produced parts manufactured in mass production. In this context, a graph-based method is developed that enables an automated analysis of product families, based on physical and functional attributes, for standardization potentials. The method thus provides support for the strategic definition of pre-produced parts and is embedded in an overall approach for the redesign of products for Incremental Manufacturing. For the demonstration of the approach, which is based on 3D Shape and Graph Matching methods, a first case study is carried out using a guiding bush product family as an example.


Author(s):  
Adam Csapo ◽  
Barna Resko ◽  
Morten Lind ◽  
Peter Baranyi

The computerized modeling of cognitive visual information has been a research field of great interest in the past several decades. The research field is interesting not only from a biological perspective, but also from an engineering point of view when systems are developed that aim to achieve similar goals as biological cognitive systems. This article introduces a general framework for the extraction and systematic storage of low-level visual features. The applicability of the framework is investigated in both unstructured and highly structured environments. In a first experiment, a linear categorization algorithm originally developed for the classification of text documents is used to classify natural images taken from the Caltech 101 database. In a second experiment, the framework is used to provide an automatically guided vehicle with obstacle detection and auto-positioning functionalities in highly structured environments. Results demonstrate that the model is highly applicable in structured environments, and also shows promising results in certain cases when used in unstructured environments.


Robotics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Hirokazu Madokoro ◽  
Hanwool Woo ◽  
Stephanie Nix ◽  
Kazuhito Sato

This study was conducted to develop original benchmark datasets that simultaneously include indoor–outdoor visual features. Indoor visual information related to images includes outdoor features to a degree that varies extremely by time, weather, and season. We obtained time-series scene images using a wide field of view (FOV) camera mounted on a mobile robot moving along a 392-m route in an indoor environment surrounded by transparent glass walls and windows for two directions in three seasons. For this study, we propose a unified method for extracting, characterizing, and recognizing visual landmarks that are robust to human occlusion in a real environment in which robots coexist with people. Using our method, we conducted an evaluation experiment to recognize scenes divided up to 64 zones with fixed intervals. The experimentally obtained results using the datasets revealed the performance and characteristics of meta-parameter optimization, mapping characteristics to category maps, and recognition accuracy. Moreover, we visualized similarities between scene images using category maps. We also identified cluster boundaries obtained from mapping weights.


Author(s):  
Kwansuk Oh ◽  
Jong Wook Lim ◽  
Seongwon Cho ◽  
Junyeol Ryu ◽  
Yoo S. Hong

AbstractVariety management is a cross-domain issue in product family design. In the real field, the relationships across the domains are so complex for most of the existing product families that they cannot be easily identified without proper reference architecture. This reference architecture should provide the cross- domain mapping mechanisms in an explicit manner and be able to identify the proper units for management. From this perspective of cross-domain framework, this paper introduces development architecture (DA) to describe the relationships between elements in market, design, and production domains and to give insights for the cross-domain variety management in the product development stage. DA has three parts: (1) the arrangement of elements in each domain, (2) the mapping between elements, and (3) the identification of management sets and key interfaces which are the proper units for variety management. The proposed development architecture framework is applied to the case of front chassis family of modules of an automobile.


1985 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew F. Monk

Marr and Nishihara (1978) have made certain recommendations about how representations postulated in a theory of visual information processing should be specified. Using this scheme the paper discusses representations which might be postulated in a model of visual word recognition. A representation is specified in terms of a set of primitives (e.g., word identities or visual features) in combination with a coordinate system. The coordinate systems considered are retinal, spatial (e.g., position on page) word-centred (position in word) and sentence-centred (position in sentence). Various combinations of primitives and coordinate systems are considered along with how to decide which combinations are actually generated in the process of fluent reading. A tentative model is put forward in which a single processing stage, which starts anew after each saccade, generates a representation with word identities as its primitives and sentence-centred coordinates. Evidence to support such a model which has no intermediate representation with spatial coordinates is briefly reviewed.


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