Cognitive Companion – Designing a cognitive assistant for the bedside nursing practice at the Erasmus MC Sophia
Jan 2024 - ongoing
Technological innovation can provide valuable solutions for the challenges facing the healthcare sector. However, the development of such innovations poses transdisciplinary challenges in aligning academic research, practice, and technology. This graduation project addressed those challenges by conducting exploratory design research for the bedside nursing practice at the Children’s Thorax Center at Erasmus MC Sophia Children’s Hospital. The goal was to co-design, with the nurses themselves, a concept for a robotic or AI device that would support them in their daily work practices.
The initial phase of the project focused on gaining familiarity with the bedside nursing practice to establish preliminary insights for desired changes. Nurses were shadowed during their shifts at the pediatric ward, employing a contextual inquiry research method to gather observational insights and enhance the understanding of bedside nursing. A reflective analysis resulted in a list of desired transformations within the practice. These transformations were validated and further elaborated upon through a group feedback session with nurses, which culminated in primary design opportunities involving improved local accessibility of medical data for input and retrieval, interpersonal communication, and memory support.
The second phase focused on further defining opportunities for innovation development and bridging insights from current practice to a design direction for the future. The analysis of four practice dimensions relating to tangibility and relativity resulted in ‘personal cognitive support for nurses at the bedside’ being identified as the most valuable strategic focus for novel technology research and design development. Subsequently, a future perspective of bedside nursing practice was explored through a generative session with nurses.
The third and final phase of the project involved Research through Design, using a bridging concept for a cognitive assistant named the Cognitive Companion (Coco) which is an AI-enabled wearable device, worn in the chest pocket of the uniform. The concept features the operational ease of voice control using AI speech recognition, suited for interactions at the bedside. The purpose of Coco as a bridging concept is to facilitate further research and design development in nursing practice toward the realization of the pervasive computing future perspective. To achieve this, a pretotype (an aesthetic prototype in which core functionality was simulated using Wizard of Oz techniques) was built and tested in real nursing practice. This revealed that current interventions force nurses to adjust their practice to accommodate technology interactions, which adds extra mental strain by demanding their focus and mental energy during bedside care.
Ultimately, this project concluded that future technological developments for bedside nursing should focus on human interactions and care, which are fundamental aspects that must be safeguarded. Interactions with technology interventions should be simple, easily accessible, and seamlessly integrated into the practice surroundings so that they support rather than distract from patient care. The proposal building on these findings follows a future perspective of pervasive computing in practice, which can be supported through the development of the Coco AI-enabled wearable.
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