# Design of Personalized Devices--The Tradeoff between Individual Value and Personalization Workload
## 1 Introduction
Consequently, in the context of a personalization project, it is important to consider whether personalization is at all controllable and worthwhile for the company in question. The benefit of a medical device cannot be expressed in monetary terms and compared like-for-like with complexity costs. Instead, the increased product benefit must be viewed and evaluated  
Figure 1: (a) Predefined, discrete attributes of a variant product family compared to (b) a personalizable product family with personalized attribute. holistically in the context of the market and the treatment. Personalization only makes sense in situations where there is a great diversity of needs and the individually adapted attributes have the potential to significantly increase the product benefit [13]. As such, this paper was based on the following research question:  
_How can an appropriate variety level be defined for a product family, taking into account standardized, variant, and personalized attributes and focusing on medical devices?_  
As described above, personalization plays a special role in medical technology. Despite this, it has been shown that complexity, or variety management, has not yet been associated with medical devices, nor has modularity or design for variety [14]. Thus far, the focus has mainly been on methods for the user integration and risk assessment of medical devices. With this in mind, the following section will describe some general variant management strategies. There are a number of different strategies that are generally used to control variety-induced complexity. In addition to process-based strategies, which include postponement and process commonality, the product platform and modular design are used as product-based strategies for product portfolios with a large number of variants [5]. These offer the possibility of maintaining a comparatively large product portfolio, hereinafter referred to as external variety, while simultaneously reducing the internal variety, which describes the variety of components, parts, products and processes [5; 12]. Different product variants can be created by configuring the modules accordingly, which takes place after the application of modularization or platform design methods such as those described in [15; 16; 17; 12]. These may be standardized modules with standardized components that are used in each product variant of a product family, or also variant modules with at least one variant component, which evoke the differentiating product behavior of each of the product variants as perceived by the customer. Nevertheless, the personalization of product components and thus the determination of personalizable product attributes has not really been taken into consideration when designing modular product families. In addition to the definition of standardized and variant components, a personalizable/individualizable component with at least one personalizable attribute has to be determined [18; 19]. [PERSON] believes that the best way to implement personalized attributes is in a software-based setting and not in hardware components [20]. [PERSON] et al. introduced _Open Architecture Products_, in which personalized modules with individual attributes are developed by different developers in collaboration with the customer before being integrated into a central platform using a standardized interface [21]. This idea requires a complete decoupling of the personalized module from the other product modules. This can be analyzed by using, for example, semantic networks and graphs in order to represent the product structure and its interconnections between the components. With the help of the graphs, an estimate of the adjustment workload required when changing one element can be done, taking into account the resulting changes to other elements [22; 23].