Medband
Hospital HCI
Applying human-computer interfaces to improve the hospital experience for both nurses and patients
Duration
14 Weeks, Spring 2021
Team Members
Addy Fu
Rodney Edwards
Amy Kim
Rose Kim
Contribution
UX Research
Watch UI
Competitive Analysis
User Research
Brief
Our team set out to streamline the hospital workflow. To this end, we designed a new interface for a wearable wristband device for use in clinics and hospitals that monitors physical and mental health of patients and gives patients access to information and services.
Outcome
Incorporated new hardware affordances for patients and conceptualized an enterprise software solution. While not a full replacement for current processes, our solution resolved process and emotional friction points throughout both patient and nurse user experiences.
PROBLEM
Hospital workers are restricted from quickly and efficiently managing patients by bureaucratic procedure, a lack of situational awareness tools, and human error caused by information overload and fatigue.
APPROACH
We want to reduce friction points in the workflow and apply cognitive design principles to make hospitals more accommodating for both patients and care providers.
Scoping: Hospital Flow
Bureaucratic Obstacles
There's a lot of procedures and paperwork that needs to be followed and completed before a patient can be processed and treated. These friction points in the process causes slowdown and confusion.
Human Error
While people do make mistakes, hospitals workers can make more due to fatigue and cognitive overload in such a complex work environment.
Low Situational Awareness
Both patients and doctors often don't have a clear idea of what's happening around them. Keeping track of patients and staff isn't easy, which can lead to mixups and mistakes by care providers. Patients are also stuck without information for long periods and only receive sporadic updates from doctors.
Lack of Empathy
While care workers are impressive people who love to help others, the patient experience is fraught with bursts of extreme emotions and long periods of boredom or anxiety in a sterile environment. There's little human connection or reassurance during the wait time in the intake room or during down-time wherein a patient simply must wait in bed.
01
ECOSYSTEM
Digital Wristband
A medical band given to patients during the intake process in a hospital. The band's purpose is to improve communication, records, and location tracking of the patient.
Bedside Tablet and Dock
An in-room dock for improving the patient experience, transparency of hospital procedure, and facilitate communication between patient and care provider.
Nurse Dashboard
A dashboard platform that empowers nurses and doctors with visibility into their patient's states. The platform aims to aid communication between nurses and doctors, which will enable them to react faster to emergencies.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
6-Minds Framing
Vision
We want to design our visual system and IA for glanceability. This provides us the framework to better leverage the smaller screen size and index around only calling out essential information.
Wayfinding
We found that the color system used in our ecosystem is essential for way-finding both for the patient and for the practitioner. A multi-tiered color hierarchy allows us to break down essential information and for use across the navigation
Language
Patients want to know in a broad sense what their condition is. As non-medical professionals, they won’t understand much about raw diagnostic data or hospital procedure so the best design solution is to offer a rough estimate of their situation.
Decision Making
In a hospital situation, a patient does not have absolute freedom. Doctor's orders may place restrictions on what a patient can do in their setting and so our design will need to focus around those restrictions.
Emotion
A hospital setting will have periods of extreme emotions and even longer periods of boredom or worry.
In this kind of setting, the system should provide reassurance that the patient is being looked after even while they’re waiting a long time to be treated.
Memory
Design for reducing functionality to a limited set of features or features that are context-specific because of the screen size afforded to us. Reduce cognitive fatigue for our users by not introducing any new micro-interactions or gestures that would need to be taught.
Affective Computing
The hospital experience is characterized by short periods of extreme emotions and long periods of boredom or worry. In this high-stress environment, it is important that the system is capable of empathy.
To this end, we incorporating Apple's memoji feature to act as a friendly face that interfaces with patients.
Memoji Avatar
Choosing between a patient avatar and a nurse avatar, we found that a nurse avatar is more comforting for the patient. It acts a reassuring design element that instills the idea that the patient is being looked after at all times.
Nurse Avatar
Patient Avatar
02
PATIENT
KEY SCREENS
Patient Watch Experience
IA & Interaction Model
Waiting Room: Insights
This could be a nice moment for affective computing, through words or chatbot.
A moment for teaching any interactions and building trust.
Don’t: Avoid time silos, avoid exact time increments (watching soup bowl feels like torture), Avoid complex interaction models
Time to be seen: Insight
Adding the floor representation visual will help improve glanceability for the nurses to locate patients.
First Run Experience: Features
Wayfinding Feature: giving a visual affordance for finding a patient when they call will help improve response time for the nurse to get to the patient.
Concept Feature: with a new affordance, can we leverage sensors in the band to improve accessibility, e.g, live translate?
Wait Time Affordance: User Testing
“Exact time increments are too detailed, in a way that causes me more anxiety. I want it to be a quick glance type of thing if I’m sitting in discomfort...”
“I like that it tells me the exact time like the third one. The first one causes major anxiety.”
KEY SCREENS
Patient bedside dock
Key Screen: Patient Dashboard
The patient's comfortable activity radius will be lying in bed or leaning. Important buttons and navigation were placed accordingly near the bottom where it's easier to reach.
Emotion
The patient experience is fraught with extreme emotion and long periods of boredom or anxiety. Situational awareness, broadly understanding what their recovery is like, and access to an emergency alert allows the patient to feel less helpless.
Language
While some patients might know what vital readings can indicate, we can't expect patients to understand complex diagnoses. We chose a few basic data points for patients to be able to see, color coded for ease of understanding, and a general recovery progress bar.
03
NURSE
KEY SCREENS
Nurse Dashboard Experience
Dashboard: Vision, Wayfinding, Memory
Our nurse-facing UI facilitates communication between nurses and doctors and improves emergency reaction times.
We wanted an interface that provides enough information for nurses to effectively manage patients yet simple enough to be understood at a glance. The system is in dark mode by default for reduced eye strain.
Key Feature: Call and assign doctors
Drag and drop doctors to assign them to patients.
Key Feature: Doctor-nurse communication
Receive messages and requests from doctors working with patients.
04
OUTCOME
Afterword
This project was a great learning experience for human-computer interaction and applying cognitive design principles. The most significant part of this exercise, in my eyes, was that we were able to come up with a feature set that was both capable and was tuned to the psychology of the context we were working in.
As an exercise this was a fun piece to incorporate relatively new technology into the hospital. Speaking realistically however, the healthcare industry innovates slowly for good reasons. The smartwatch, for example, simply isn't good at accurately accessing patient vitals and wouldn't be acceptable in a medical setting. That being said, the problems we identified are still valid points and there is a need for a solution. This project is a good demonstration of what good design could potentially do for the future of hospital care.
Copyright
Addy Fu 2024
All rights reserved