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My name is Aidan Hird. I am a medical devices Systems Engineer with a history of hands-on technical leadership roles across a variety of clinical applications.

I established Nurtured Revolution to assist your team in overcoming the challenges of modern medical device development.

Nurtured Revolution embodies my passion for the advancement of medical care through great engineering. As an industry, we bring staggering advances to market every year but technical, economic and regulatory realities mean many more never see the light of day. I am driven by the conviction that we can do better – that prudent engineering decision-making can protect our advances from failure to benefit patients and business alike.

I recognize the value of your central innovation, science or IP. I also understand that tangential issues particular to the medical field can kill the most promising invention in transition from prototype to product. Product developers must address both the core technology and the less exciting aspects surrounding it. 

I work with you to defend the revolutionary from the mundane.

I provide guidance and engineering services, augmenting or integrated with your team on a flexible basis. Services are primarily targeted at technical leads, systems architects and business development and clinical roles interacting with product development.

My technical approach has developed over years of experience in the medical devices industry but also incorporates thinking and techniques to tame increasing product complexity informed by the aerospace, automotive and transport sectors. I help you to establish good engineering practice to support long-term success by balancing the methodical approach familiar in traditional industry with the flexibility normally enjoyed by cutting-edge start-ups, to allow rapid and nimble development but over strong foundations.

Three learnings are fundamental to my approach:

  • That experience counts. Medical device development is undeniably difficult, but history tends to repeat itself. Many problems can be avoided by taking experienced advice at regular intervals. The complexity of development tends to mean foresight and prevention is far more powerful than remediation after the event.

  • That system purpose is key to product success and needs continuous attention. The medical field is notoriously impatient with devices and processes that are poorly-designed for their context of use. If it does not fit in, it will not be used and if it is not used, it will not sell for long. The exercise of shaping your product to fit its context is a two-way conversation with the market and requires conscious, continuous iteration throughout development.

  • That continuous, conscious system design is crucial. Both regulatory acceptance and ongoing maintainability rely upon finishing development with a full understanding of the product design and, crucially, why the design is as it is. This is most efficiently achieved by incorporating a system-level perspective throughout the engineering process.

I will show you how a systems-centric approach to product development improves product desirability, increases visibility and control of your design process, reduces project risk, enables efficient team scale-up and helps to satisfy regulatory requirements.