Development of a software for the design of custom-made hip prostheses using an open-source rapid application development environment

The present work describes a technology transfer project called HIPCOM devo ted to the re-engineering of the process used by a medical devices manufact urer to design custom-made hip prostheses. Although it started with insuffi cient support from the end-user management, a very tight scheduling and a m oderate budget, the project developed into what is considered by all partne rs a success story. In particular, the development of the design software, called HIPCOM Interactive Design Environment (HIDE) was completed in a time shorter than any optimistic expectation. The software was quite stable sin ce its first beta version, and once introduced at the user site it fully re placed the original procedure in less than two months. One year after the e arly adoption, more than 80 custom-made prostheses had been designed with H IDE and the user had reported only two bugs, both cosmetics. The scope of t he present work was to report the development experience and to investigate the reasons for these positive results, with particular reference to the d evelopment procedure and the software architecture. The choice of TCL/TK as development language and the adoption of well-defined software architectur e were found to be the success key factors. Other important determinants we re found to be the adoption of an incremental software engineering strategy , well suited for small to medium projects and the presence in the developm ent staff of a technology transfer expert.