Self-Inserting Speculum
A human-centered redesign of the vaginal speculum. The starting point wasn’t the mechanism — it was a simple observation about pain: the same small procedure hurts less when you do it to yourself than when someone else does it to you (tweezing a hair, pinching your own skin). The standard Sim’s speculum is the opposite of that — cold, it clicks, and it puts the patient in stirrups while a clinician operates the instrument. This project asks what a speculum looks like if the patient inserts and controls it herself.
The idea
The design borrows its insertion model from something patients already use themselves comfortably — the tampon — and reframes the exam as patient-controlled rather than clinician-controlled. That’s not just a comfort nicety: user research motivated the direction. In a survey of roughly 200 women, most of those offered a self-exam agreed to it, and the overwhelming majority reported the experience as positive. A device that lets the patient do the insertion herself turns an anxiety-laden, provider-driven procedure into one she has agency over.
The design work
My contribution was the industrial and mechanical design: the CAD model in the animation above — the ergonomic handle sized for self-insertion, the bill geometry, and the internal adjustment mechanism that opens the bills once positioned. The whole shape is driven by the human-factors goal: it has to be something a patient can hold, orient, and actuate on herself, which is a very different constraint set from an instrument designed to be operated by a second person.
A university medical-device design project — no public repo. The animation is my own CAD render; the description is drawn from the project's own materials.