In this 5 week project, Eonbi Hong, Natálie Švehlová and myself, explored new ways to make it more efficient and comfortable to monitor patients on remote. For the first two weeks we also worked together with Signe Lindgren and Sander Randoja, were we first got familiar with the hospital environment and today's Hospital Patient Monitors.
Proposal
By observing two real life scenarios, we discovered that parameter values alone often doesn't tell the full story of the patient's situation. This is a problem for telehealth nurses who's job is to monitor the status of patients and contact the ward if they see something alarming.
We came up with a feature that lets telehealth nurses intuitively see what is actually going on at the ward, both in real-time and in the past. The work focused a lot on understanding how to display relevant information clearly, without intruding on people's privacy or naively relying on advanced algorithms that can interpret the scene wrong. We wanted to create a stable and simple solution that could do a big improvement for the telehealth monitoring workflow.
We believe this feature would improve the telehealth nurses' efficiency in assisting the medical staff physically at the ward, as well as reduce their emotion stress that comes from the uncertainty of limited information. The feature is developed to be easily integrated on top of the current system, making it easy for the nurses to adopt the new design of the Hospital Patient Monitor.
Research group visiting the Thorax Operation Room at the hospital in Umeå (Norrlands Universitetssjukhus).
The standard screen, based on the current system.
We invented the "Mini Map" feature which lets the telehealth nurse see if any medical staff (turquoise dots) is around the patient (grey box) at a glance. When clicked, a detailed overview of the situation around the patient opens up. We call this new panel the "Focused View".
The Focused View opens up between the two columns of patient cards. That way we can reduce movement on screen and make sure the Focused View is always right beside the selected card. We also made sure to keep parameters from all patients visible at all times.
This video illustrates how the user can scroll between a 3D bedside view and a 2D overview of the entire ward. The 3D view shows body posture which is useful to see specific actions the medical staff is doing. The 2D view focuses more on the medicals staffs' position. If no medical staff is directly beside the patient, we predict it would be useful to see if someone is on their way.
The group working late in the evening, testing screens on a bigger monitor.
Project design system the team developed to make the concept behave consistently (and look a bit nicer).
Mapping out different types of information that could be displayed in the concept.
Full research group in the "fika" room at the Thorax unit at the hospital in Umeå.
External contributors.
The project was done in collaboration with Philips Healthcare.
I would also like to thank Leon Andersen and the rest if the medical staff at the hospital in Umeå (Norrlands Universitetssjukhus) for inviting us in to your intense workplaces in the thorax operation room and thorax ICU. It not only laid the foundation for the rest of the project, it also gave me a greater appreciation of the amazing work the nurses and doctors caring for critical patients does daily and nightly.
