My senior design project was for a medical device company. Five of us worked our ass off for 4 months to come up with a machine that would assemble parts of a biomedical device. At the end our system worked great, and it clearly would have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars a year in wasted product. Everyone at the company was very excited about it, and they planned to use it on the actual factory floor.
It was going to take 2.5 years for the FDA to approve it. In the meantime, it sat on a shelf waiting and waiting and waiting.
With timelines like that, nobody can accomplish anything without billions and billions of dollars.
This. If your hardware/software requires FDA approval, quick and dirty is NOT an option. And, I think unless you are know that domain (that is, the FDA approval process), you are likely to just give up because of how difficult/time-consuming it can be.
It was going to take 2.5 years for the FDA to approve it. In the meantime, it sat on a shelf waiting and waiting and waiting.
With timelines like that, nobody can accomplish anything without billions and billions of dollars.