5 Service Design of Rehabilitative Exoskeleton for Sustainable …
61
monetary or non-monetary profits for manufacturers, medical facilitates and other
possible stakeholder in the business.
To design effective service, a number of approaches such as product and service
system (PSS) (Tukker and Tischner 2006), customer-oriented design (Kimita et al.
2009), are suggested. However, service design is still challenging with the increasing
environmental pressure and demand of customization. With growing demands for
sustainable products, there are clear implications for developing engineering capabilities of holistic application of sustainability concepts to products, processes and
services design. Tao et al. (2018) proposed a QFD-based approach of life cycle
scheming driven by sustainable value requirements. The proposed approach help
bring experts in fields of product and process engineering, industrial management
and ecological assessments to a common vision, and therefore accelerate design
convergence for more sustainable products, processes and business. There are also
evident needs of the systematic methodical support for the entire design process
from requirements identification to concept configuration for product and service
customization. To address the needs, Song et al. (2016) proposed a customizationoriented framework for design of sustainable product/service system, while Fargnoli
et al. (2019) proposed a product/service design process with synergic use of QFD
for PSS, Axiomatic Design (AD) and the service blueprint tools.
Rehabilitative exoskeleton is considered advanced medical instrument in China.
According to the authors knowledge, service design of such exoskeleton is still new
in practice. The purpose of this study is to exploit service design of rehabilitative
exoskeleton for stroke patients based on the Chinese national conditions. Taking
advantages of some existing methods, in this study, sustainable value is conceptualized from engineering perspectives and introduced as the anchor of stakeholder
interests and motive power to drive the service design process. This study may shed
lights on servitization of the emerging technology.
5.2 Conceptualization of Sustainable Value
With the three pillars of sustainability in mind, “sustainable value”, in this study,
is conceptualized as the total satisfaction of value requirements from perspectives
of economic, social and environment. Also, under the umbrella of life engineering,
the total sustainable value of a product and/or service include values delivered to
customers and businesses partner throughout the life cycle. Thus, sustainable value
requirements (SVRs) answer to the critical question of WHAT is valuable to different
shareholders from sustainable perspectives. Without loss of generality, the system of
SVRs is proposed as shown in Fig. 5.1. Therefore, the ultimate goal of sustainable
value engineering is to maximize the overall value perceived by different stakeholders
by increasing level of satisfaction of value demands.
61
monetary or non-monetary profits for manufacturers, medical facilitates and other
possible stakeholder in the business.
To design effective service, a number of approaches such as product and service
system (PSS) (Tukker and Tischner 2006), customer-oriented design (Kimita et al.
2009), are suggested. However, service design is still challenging with the increasing
environmental pressure and demand of customization. With growing demands for
sustainable products, there are clear implications for developing engineering capabilities of holistic application of sustainability concepts to products, processes and
services design. Tao et al. (2018) proposed a QFD-based approach of life cycle
scheming driven by sustainable value requirements. The proposed approach help
bring experts in fields of product and process engineering, industrial management
and ecological assessments to a common vision, and therefore accelerate design
convergence for more sustainable products, processes and business. There are also
evident needs of the systematic methodical support for the entire design process
from requirements identification to concept configuration for product and service
customization. To address the needs, Song et al. (2016) proposed a customizationoriented framework for design of sustainable product/service system, while Fargnoli
et al. (2019) proposed a product/service design process with synergic use of QFD
for PSS, Axiomatic Design (AD) and the service blueprint tools.
Rehabilitative exoskeleton is considered advanced medical instrument in China.
According to the authors knowledge, service design of such exoskeleton is still new
in practice. The purpose of this study is to exploit service design of rehabilitative
exoskeleton for stroke patients based on the Chinese national conditions. Taking
advantages of some existing methods, in this study, sustainable value is conceptualized from engineering perspectives and introduced as the anchor of stakeholder
interests and motive power to drive the service design process. This study may shed
lights on servitization of the emerging technology.
5.2 Conceptualization of Sustainable Value
With the three pillars of sustainability in mind, “sustainable value”, in this study,
is conceptualized as the total satisfaction of value requirements from perspectives
of economic, social and environment. Also, under the umbrella of life engineering,
the total sustainable value of a product and/or service include values delivered to
customers and businesses partner throughout the life cycle. Thus, sustainable value
requirements (SVRs) answer to the critical question of WHAT is valuable to different
shareholders from sustainable perspectives. Without loss of generality, the system of
SVRs is proposed as shown in Fig. 5.1. Therefore, the ultimate goal of sustainable
value engineering is to maximize the overall value perceived by different stakeholders
by increasing level of satisfaction of value demands.