UltiMo: A silent patient monitor
Feb 2018 - ongoing
Changing monitor behaviour based on the ones present in the patient room.
Monitoring devices are designed to be a crucial work tool for medical staff in the intensive care unit. Patients and their visitors are involuntarily exposed to this visual and auditory information while they lack knowledge to interpret it or even the need or capacity to use them. This leads to stressful situations for visitors and disturbing experiences for the patients, especially when clinicians are not present in the room. UltiMo is a smart monitor that adapts to the people in the space, and is presented at the Dutch Design Week 2018.
Our biggest challenge was to cater to the different users. Clinicians and visitors enter a patient box multiple times a day and both have different needs in terms of what is shown on screen.
Pinch Studio
How does it work?
UltiMo is making itself user-sensitive by knowing who is present in the patient room, using a camera and Bluetooth beacons. UltiMo is by default showing the silent patient mode. When the camera counts a visitor entering the room, the display provides easy to understand information catered to the visitors’ knowledge and needs. When a clinician is entering the room, the PC recognises the Bluetooth beacon attached to the clinician’s identity card. As a result, the displays becomes active and alive: it provides the nurse with all the data about the patient’s vitals.
Since the main job of the monitor is to inform the nurse about their patient’s vitals, a hierarchy is built in when different types of people are in the patient box. Whenever a clinician walks into the room, even though other people are in the room, the monitor shows the clinician’s screen.
Redesigned monitor
Pinch studio redesigned the patient monitor so that it represents the UltiMo well. UltiMo as a system consists of a sensor-panel, camera, beacons, PC, mounting basket, standt, and a display. The inspiration for the design comes from a vision of a Silent ICU where the patient experiences a peaceful recovery. The design has started with sketching the main component of the system, the PC, where all the processing takes place. As the novelty of the product is that it senses the people present in the patient box and reacts accordingly, the new design has a clean, friendly and modern look that conveys the intelligence of the system.
