About
— FOCUS
User Centred Design
— DURATION
12 week university project
— DATE
Spring 2020
Being in the hospital was never a positive prospect; but with COVID-19, the family you wanted to see are now unable to come visit you. The one interaction you have is with the nurse, who is heads down in paper work everytime they see you.
To learn and stress the importance of user centered design, I was tasked to redesign the hospital thermometer, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The EK Metre is designed to contactlessly measure, record and send the patient's temperature to the hospital system, and give time for the nurse to spend giving proper patient care.
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Context
When first posed with working a space where thermometers were already prevalent, I turned to nurses and interviewed them about issues they have in the workplace in general. Concerns mainly lied with understaffing and the lack of time given per patient due to high levels of hand documentation.
With my given task of designing a thermometer, I chose to design a thermometer that eased the stress from hand documentation, and give time back to the nurses who were currently under the additional stress of COVID-19 patients. The patients, who are able to talk to a more approachable nurse, now have a chance to socialise.
Research
Persona Boards + Problem Framing
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Persona boards developed through interviewing
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Problems identified through interviews with nurses
Solution
The solution branched further than the initial proposed brief, by including the crucial feature that solved a time issue that was addressed by the nurses. Logging large amounts of information manually took too much time, so the solution was also posed to lessen that load.
Previous Concepts
Form Finding
Hook Iterations
Iterations
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Model Making + Testing
Initially, I was told from my surveyed nurses that contactless thermometers were not used because of their inaccuracy. For the sake of the project I made it contactless, but realistically I should implement the feedback and keep it contact based, if I could not improve on the accuracy of contactless thermometers.
Also, in future projects, I need to always be mindful of the context of the product, since they will implement more constraints than I set out. Being 'easy to clean' was definitely not a part of the initial proposed brief.
Note: EK was also named to be said like "Egg", because it's shaped like an egg :)