Proceedings of International Conference On Innovations, Recent Trends And Challenges In Mechatronics, Mechanical Engineering And New High-Tech Products Development – MECAHITECH’11, vol. 3, year: 2011 140 Personalised Medical Product Development: Methods, Challenges and Opportunities C.H Le a , M.I Okereke a , V.H Nguyen b , V.D Dao c , N Zlatov d , V.T Nguyen e , T.H Le f a School of Engineering, University of Greenwich, Kent ME4 4TB, UK b Faculté des Sciences et Technologie, Université Paris-Est, 94010 Créteil cedex, France c Ritsumeikan University, 1-1-1 NojiHigashi, Kusatsu, Shiga, 525-8577, Japan d School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Wales CF24 3AA, UK e Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Nha Trang University, Nha Trang, Vietnam f School of Information & Communication Technology, Hanoi University of Science & Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam Postal address: Dr Chi Hieu Le, School of Engineering, University of Greenwich, Pembroke, Central Avenue, Chatham Maritime, Kent ME4 4TB, UK. Email: C.H.Le@gre.ac.uk Abstract Personalised health care in general and personalised medical products in particular aim to provide the optimal diagnosis and treatment with the use of the right medicine, tools and devices to the right patient at the right time in order to meet well technical and clinical requirements as well as individual characteristics of each patient. It offers the increased effectiveness and better patient safety, and finally to obtain the best diagnosis and treatment quality. In this paper and presentation, the area of personalised medical product design and development is emphasised with the focus on design and manufacturing of implants, surgical tools, medical devices, orthotics and prostheses. State of the art technologies, methods and resources for developing personalised medical products are presented in which challenges and opportunities are addressed and discussed. Keywords Personalised health care, medical product development, implants, surgical tools, orthotics. 1. Introduction Patient-specific diagnosis and treatments have been one of the most emerging research topics recently. The concept of Personalised Heath Care (PH) or Personalised Medicine (PM) was well documented [1, 2, 3]; it was firstly considered as a novel strategy to tailor medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient, with a main attention about the pharmaceutical area. However, the terms PH and PM are today widely used in different areas and medical applications. Especially, there have been a lot of efforts in development of personalised medical products and services for optimal diagnosis and treatment to meet well both clinical and technical requirements since the late 1990s [5-8]. With the advancement of design and manufacturing technologies in the last decades, more and more high-value added personalised medical products have been successfully developed, and brought in well-recognised benefits for patients. The high interest in PH is clearly shown in the recent funding calls from European Commission, under the FP7 work programmes in 2011 and 2012. PH is one of the main content of the Information and Communications Technologies - ICT call [4], especially the following ones: (i) Objective ICT-2011.5.1 - Personal Health Systems; (ii) Objective ICT-2011.5.5 - ICT for smart and personalised inclusion; and (iii) Objective ICT-2011.5.3 - Patient guidance services, safety and healthcare record information reuse. The term "personalised" and “patient-specific” as well as the related ones are used for different areas of application and research, including the following topics and key-words: (1) Patient guidance services for personalised management of health status; (2) Personalised web-based assistive and social computing solutions; (3) Patient- specific data and models of organs; (4) Personalised health systems; (5) Personalised digital media; (6) Personalised and predictive care; (7) Personalised prevention and research; (8) Personalisable solutions for learning and skills acquisition as well as Brain-Neural Computer Interfaces; (9) Personal health systems for remote management of diseases, treatment and rehabilitation; (10) Personal health records systems; (11) Personalised services and support; (12) Personalised instructional design; (13) Personalisation of educational technologies; and (14) Systems for personalised interaction with users. The tendency for funding and investment in personalised products and services are clearly seen, in which personalised medical product design and development is one of the most interesting areas for the last decades, especially from the time when Rapid Prototyping (RP) and Rapid Manufacturing (RM) were successfully applied for development of implants, surgical tools and medical devices for diagnosis and treatment [5-11]. With the use of patient data for medical product development, implants, surgical tools and medical