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Data acquisition on how users are using your product can often be slow to obtain and not lend itself to large-scale deployments or fast release updates. Product analytics is an integrated set of data about your users’ behaviors that allows you to analyze these behaviors, both at the level of the individual user and in aggregate, to gain insights about larger patterns and trends in real time. The use of product analytics in MedTech is still nascent but holds tremendous promise to help turbocharge an evolution towards the frequent release of medical devices. In the context of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), digital therapeutics (DTx), and other types of connected medical devices, product analytics adds value in three different areas: device design and development, device operations and end-user support, and helping users better use their device and improve their health outcomes.

The medical device industry has a long legacy of product development processes that are heavily influenced by the design of the device hardware. As devices have become connected, often to smartphones via connections such as Bluetooth, software is playing an increasing role in the overall system and in particular the user interface. As a result, iterative agile design practices that are prevalent in software are starting to influence the connected device development process. These modern agile practices put the user at the center of the design problem. But what is the best way in this new world to get feedback from users such that the overall product can be improved? In this paper, we share two techniques, one qualitative and one quantitative, that can answer this question. We’ll also explore the synergy of using both techniques together.

In September's This Way In, we printed a letter from Nick Wojtasik, a fifteen-year-old in need of advice on dressing like a man. We asked readers to help. Here, some [...]