RENEW

Project Overview

In healthcare, precision and efficiency are essential to delivering optimal patient care, yet healthcare workers often struggle to access important information quickly and without interruption. Mobile technology has revolutionized the medical field by improving data access and patient management, but challenges remain in ensuring that health professionals can retrieve critical information in real-time, especially in fast-paced environments. The World Health Organization reports that up to 70% of healthcare errors result from miscommunication and distractions, emphasizing the need for tools that enhance efficiency and reduce interruptions in high-pressure situations. This project aims to address these issues by focusing on improving the accuracy, speed, and tracking of patient vitals, particularly in urgent situations where every second counts.

The challenge lies in finding a balance between delivering quality patient care and managing the fast-paced, multitasking environment of a clinic or hospital. Healthcare professionals such as nurses, physician assistants, and paramedics are often juggling time-sensitive tasks, like monitoring vital signs, while managing numerous patients throughout the day. The complexity of their work can lead to distractions and inefficiencies, especially when switching between various tools and systems. This project seeks to develop a subtle, non-intrusive tool that enables healthcare workers to efficiently track patient vitals in real-time, helping them stay on pace throughout the day and ultimately improving patient care in urgent settings.

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Problem Statement:

How might we How might we create an apple watch app that fits into healthcare workflows, helping manage time, reduce distractions, and focus on exceptional patient care?

Research

Vital signs, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and body temperature, are essential indicators of a person’s health, but current methods for measuring and tracking them in healthcare settings often present challenges that impact both workflow and patient care. Human factors, such as physical strain from repetitive tasks, perceptual difficulties with unclear data displays, and cognitive overload from multitasking, all contribute to inefficiencies and errors. Additionally, emotional stress in high-pressure environments can further hinder performance. Many healthcare workers have turned to wearable technology like the Apple Watch to streamline their workflows, but existing health apps often lack comprehensive integration into clinical settings. While some apps focus on individual health metrics or clinical decision support, few are designed to address real-time monitoring, task alerts, and overall workflow efficiency in professional environments.

Market Research:

Market research played a crucial role in identifying key tools commonly used in medical apps and systems, which helped us understand the needs and pain points of healthcare professionals. Through examining existing solutions, we discovered that timers, paging systems, and electronic health records (EHR) are central to many workflows in medical settings. Timers are essential for monitoring time-sensitive tasks, such as administering medications or tracking patient vitals, while paging systems help facilitate communication among medical teams. Electronic health records, though integral for documenting patient information, can often create barriers due to their lack of integration with real-time monitoring tools. This research highlighted the need for a more seamless, unified system that can incorporate these tools into a single platform, helping healthcare professionals manage their tasks more efficiently and reduce the risk of errors.

Users:

Understanding the diversity in roles within healthcare is crucial for creating an app that meets the specific needs of different professionals, such as nurses, physicians, and emergency responders. By tailoring features to address their unique workflows and responsibilities, the app can enhance user experience and improve patient care across various healthcare environments.

Physicians
Nurses
Paramedics
Home Health Aids
Anesthesiologists
Surgeons
Travel Nurses
CNA’s

Human Factors Concerns:

Considering human factors concerns is essential to ensure that healthcare tools and workflows are designed to minimize strain, reduce errors, and improve overall efficiency and performance in high-pressure environments.

Physical - Medical professionals face repetitive tasks and high physical demands, leading to strain and inefficiency, this emphasizes the need for streamlined workflows to reduce taxing actions.

Perceptual - The clarity and visibility of vital sign displays are crucial for medical professionals, particularly in low-light or stressful environments where manual data entry may increase errors.

Cognitive - Multitasking and distractions can lead to cognitive overload, increasing the likelihood of errors when tracking and managing patients’ vital signs and schedules.

Emotional - High-stress environments, long shifts, and patient anxiety significantly impact the emotional resilience and performance of medical professionals.

Ideation:

The first stage of prototyping looked at coming up with ideas to solve the main priorities found during user interviews. These priorities included reducing distractions, making time-sensitive tasks more efficient, and improving ease of use in stressful situations. During this ideation phase, we considered a few concepts for the user interface of an Apple Watch screen. We ideated on various aspects, such as button types, the layout of the screens, sizes of the buttons, and how to lay out features including clocks, task management, notifications, focus modes, speech-to-text, and potential solutions for note-taking and real-time tracking, all in an effort to better assist medical professionals at work. Many different ideas were gathered into a list of possible solutions and how well they could meet the needs of healthcare workers.

User Feedback

Most of the users liked the visible clock with clear settings for minutes and seconds. They found it helpful in busy places. A common suggestion was to enhance this feature by adding color changes or indicators at important times. For example, users suggested lighting up the clock hands when certain times are reached. This would ensure that users don't have to constantly keep an eye on the clock and increase the visual cues while multitasking or in situations of urgency.

The swipe method of clearing tasks and managing schedules was liked because it was simple and fast. Users thought it was easy to swipe through tasks quickly, which helped them stay organized during busy shifts.

Users have pointed out that a clean and simple layout is necessary in order to easily navigate through the app and find tasks without adding extra stress. This also included the "tap to lock" feature, which, on one side, was favored for helping to lock the application fast. On the other hand, users felt it would be easily activated by chance during hectic moments. Further improvement was suggested by having a "hold to lock" function or even adding a passcode to further secure the feature—both suggestions, with careful handling, ensuring that the app's lock feature is purposely activated and not accidentally turned on when the user manages a myriad of tasks at hand.

Final Design:

Based on what we learned from research, ideation, user testing, iteration, and user feedback. The final prototype has key features to solve the major problems and needs of healthcare workers. We aimed to create a simple interface that cuts down distractions, makes time management easier, and allows for real-time communication about crucial tasks. This prototype is meant to improve efficiency in the workflow while maintaining privacy rules such as HIPAA.

Lock and Homescreen

The lock screen displays the time and includes a focus mode feature. Simply press and hold for 3 seconds to activate or deactivate focus mode. This can also be turned on/off in settings. The Home Screen clearly displays the app's key features: stopwatch, reminders, schedule, notifications, and settings.

Reminders

The Reminders tab enables users to set task reminders for specific rooms as they move from one to another. Users can specify the task, assign it to a room number, and choose from a selection of pre-set quick timers or customize a specific timer duration.

Schedule

The schedule feature provides users with an overview of their daily appointments. It tracks patient statuses, showing when appointments are completed, when patients have checked in, when they are ready, and when they are still waiting. A quick-view option offers a snapshot of this information at a glance. Additionally, users receive calendar-specific notifications for these updates.

Notifications

Users can manage work-specific and phone notifications separately for better organization. Phone notifications integrate with the focus mode feature, allowing users to control which notifications they receive and when. These notifications are categorized into specific groups, such as messaging or social media, making it easy to quickly access the information they need.

Settings

The Settings feature provides users with full control over focus mode, notification preferences, and reminders. Users can set focus mode time blocks to specify when they want to receive notifications and when they don’t, or they can manually toggle focus mode on and off through the settings or by pressing and holding the Lock Screen for 3 seconds.

For notification preferences, users can choose which apps they want to receive notifications from, and these notifications will automatically be grouped for easier management. Additionally, users can customize how frequently they want notifications to appear, ensuring the app fits seamlessly into their workflow.