Adopting circular strategies in medical device development: Mapping of methods along the engineering design process

With growing awareness of the environmental impact of medical devices, there is increasing recognition of the need to adopt circular strategies into their designs. This adoption involves redesigning existing devices and developing new devices, prioritizing efficiency and longevity of use through R-strategies such as Reduce, Reuse, Repair, and Recycle. As circular product design is still emerging, there is a need for practical guidance on integrating these R-strategies in medical devices. This study focuses on an inventory and mapping of methods (design methods) explicitly mentioned in the literature related to the (re)design of medical devices under the framework of circular economy principles. Through a systematic review of 28 papers, we identified 12 methods and mapped them to the corresponding R-strategies and phases of the generic engineering design process. Life cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis were the two most frequently applied methods, with 12 and five citations, respectively, and tend to focus more on eco-efficient R-strategies. Nine out of the 12 identified methods focus on redesigning existing medical devices, primarily applied during the analysis and evaluation phases. By highlighting existing methods and their R-strategy applications in medical device (re)design, our findings aim to offer guidance to select and integrate methods that can support circular design practices throughout the design process of medical devices to drive the transition to a circular economy within healthcare.