The Empathy Layer: Why Exa Partners with Sento Solutions
A medical device can be technically brilliant and still fail the people it was designed to help.
Early in her engineering career, Sento Solutions founder Carla Zampaglione watched nurses struggle to turn on a device she had helped design. The device worked. The experience did not.
The engineering was sound. But it missed what Carla calls the empathy layer: how real people encounter, understand, and use a product in practice.
That moment lit the fire behind Sento Solutions, one of Exa’s trusted partners in medical device development.
Speaking Human and Engineer
Sento exists to make people’s lives easier, whether they are patients, healthcare professionals, product developers, or project teams. Today, the company specialises exclusively in usability engineering and human factors for medical devices and digital healthcare products.
The Sento team describes themselves as “bilingual”. They speak engineer, but they also speak human. Depending on the project, that might mean speaking nurse, clinician, patient, carer, or technician; their role is to deeply understand the people using a product and translate their experiences into insights engineering teams can act on.
That translation is critical because usability is about far more than ease of use. It is about understanding whether a product fits naturally into existing workflows, whether people will adopt it, and whether it solves a problem users genuinely experience.
To answer those questions, Sento combines user research, usability engineering, formative and summative studies, and regulatory expertise. Its work helps uncover use risks early, improve safety, avoid costly redesigns, and increase the likelihood that a product will be adopted in practice.
Behind the process is a simple principle: people share their most valuable insights when they feel heard and understood.
For Sento, data only becomes valuable when it reflects a real human experience.
More Than a Checkbox
One of the most common mistakes medical device companies make is treating usability as a regulatory checkbox.
The real value lies in understanding how people will interact with a product long before it reaches the market. Will it support the way they already work? Will they feel confident using it? Is it solving a problem that genuinely exists?
This is especially important for start-ups, where resources are limited and every development decision carries weight. Small investments in user insight can prevent expensive mistakes later and help teams focus on solving the right problem from the start.
Sento’s first project was Lenexa Medical, where the Sento and Exa teams had their first opportunity to work together. That relationship revealed a strong alignment between the two businesses: a commitment to understanding the real problem, embedding usability early, working efficiently, and developing products that deliver meaningful outcomes for users.
Two Pieces of the Puzzle
The Exa and Sento partnership works because the capabilities are distinct but highly complementary.
Sento brings specialised expertise in usability, human factors, user research, and the psychology of how people interact with medical technology.
Exa brings product development and engineering expertise, helping turn those insights into practical, manufacturable medical devices.
Together, the relationship feels less like two consultancies handing work between them and more like two parts of the same puzzle.
There is a level of trust and alignment that allows both organisations to work seamlessly. Each is small enough to remain agile, experienced enough to anticipate challenges, and committed to clear communication and flexibility throughout development.
No unnecessary complexity, just the right expertise brought together to solve the right problem.
Stronger Through Specialisation
The partnership between Exa and Sento reflects something important about Australia’s medical device ecosystem: no single organisation needs to hold every capability internally.
Australia is home to highly specialised engineers, designers, usability experts, researchers, manufacturers, clinicians, and commercialisation partners. The strength of the ecosystem comes from connecting that expertise and bringing the right people into a project at the right time. Importantly, those capabilities extend beyond Australia’s borders.
Through Sento’s exclusive US partnership, clients can access participants across the United States and Europe for Human Factors Validation studies, supporting the evidence required for FDA submissions and international market entry.
It is a powerful example of how Australian medical technology businesses combine deep local expertise with global reach.
Because successful medical devices are rarely the result of a single organisation working alone. They are built by bringing together the right expertise, insights, and market access to help innovation succeed on a global stage.
