A working proof of concept helped a medical device manufacturer validate a new user experience while exploring how its existing UI could extend to an external tablet.

Close-up graphic of intertwined red blood vessels.

ICS’ Rapid Prototyping Enables Formative Testing and Unlocks a New Medical Device UI Approach 

As an intravascular imaging medical device manufacturer began updating its product, it faced two related challenges: validating a new user experience through formative testing on the target device and exploring how selected parts of the existing interface could be extended to an external tablet.

Leveraging ICS’ rapid prototyping and proof of concept development capabilities, we created a functional UI that enabled realistic formative testing while demonstrating a new approach to extending the device UI beyond its primary display. 

CHALLENGE #1

Validating a Complex New User Experience

The manufacturer needed a prototype to support formative testing. Creating a standard Figma prototype was one option but it couldn't provide the level of functionality needed to evaluate some of the controls and interactions within the product's interface.

THE SOLUTION

Rapid Prototyping with Real Code

Using our HMI Accelerator, ICS rapidly transformed the interface into a truly functional prototype, one built with real code that ran on the target hardware, providing a faster path to a more realistic, interactive experience than a conventional design prototype. For many projects, this level of functionality is all that's needed to support user evaluation and formative testing.

But in this case, several unique controls and interactions required a greater level of fidelity. We took the additional step of supplementing the HMI Accelerator-generated output with targeted custom code, creating an experience that more closely reflected the intended product.

With this higher-fidelity prototype, the manufacturer had a more realistic way to test the new experience. Watching users interact with key controls allowed the manufacturer to identify usability issues, uncover workflow friction and validate design assumptions before the design was finalized. 

Formative testing reduces uncertainty early. ICS created a functional prototype that helped a medical device manufacturer test a new UI approach and gather meaningful feedback before moving forward.

CHALLENGE #2

Extending the UI Across Two Very Different Software Environments 

The medical device’s core application, run by a technician outside the sterile field, was built on a robust Qt-based framework. The external tablet, intended for use in the operating room, ran a highly sandboxed, locked-down Chromium-based environment. That security architecture made it difficult to use conventional approaches for sharing the application UI with the tablet.

ICS saw a way to take a different approach. Rather than redesigning the application or compromising the tablet’s security model, we explored whether we could render the existing UI, stream it to the tablet and allow users to control it remotely. The same functional prototype used for formative testing gave us a way to test the concept in an environment that closely reflected the intended experience, generating meaningful feedback before a larger implementation.

We knew that simply displaying a remote screen wasn’t enough. Users needed to see portions of the existing Qt UI and interact with them using touch and mouse input, all while keeping the tablet isolated within its existing security boundaries. The key question facing us: could this approach deliver an effective user experience that felt responsive and intuitive while still ensuring acceptable performance and latency.

Medical device UI

THE SOLUTION

A Streamed UI Architecture

Our functional prototype became the foundation for a proof of concept built around offscreen rendering and real-time communication between the medical device and tablet. Using Qt's QQuickRenderControl, the application rendered its UI to an offscreen buffer. The resulting frames were compressed as JPEG images and streamed over WebSockets to a web-based frontend running in the tablet's Chromium environment.

On the tablet, a modern JavaScript framework rendered the incoming frames to an HTML canvas. Mouse and touch events were captured at the browser layer, converted to JSON messages and sent back to the core application over the same communication channel.

Together, these components created a lightweight bridge between the Qt application and the sandboxed web environment. This allowed us to explore the new UI approach without requiring privileged access to the tablet or changes to the existing application architecture.

Ultimately, our prototype – something real to put in users’ hands, not simply an architectural concept – addressed both challenges. It created a realistic experience for formative testing while proving the viability of a new approach to extending the device UI to the external tablet.

THE RESULT

Validated User Experiences and a Proven Technical Approach

ICS demonstrated that the existing medical device UI could run interactively within the tablet’s sandboxed environment without compromising its security model. Testing delivered a consistent 30 FPS with latency suitable for the intended medical interactions.

The high-fidelity prototype gave the medical device manufacturer more than a theoretical architecture: it provided a working environment in which the team could evaluate how the Qt application and tablet could communicate, what performance the approach could deliver, and how the interaction performed in practice.

With the architecture validated, the manufacturer had a stronger technical foundation that reduced design and technical uncertainty while establishing a clear path for future custom UI development on external tablets.