Triage Assistant
This project happened during my time at Loughborough University. It was part of the Design Ergonomics course and its main goals were practising prototyping techniques that would allow usability tests to be carried out for both physical and digital products.
I chose to work on the conditions of hospital environments combining some research I had started in Brazil with all the new information I could gather from the university’s laboratories and medical facilities.
It was a great opportunity to explore low and high fidelity prototypes for graphic interface alongside physical mock-ups in order to achieve quality user experience.
1
starting point
Hospitals in Brazil suffer from many critical issues mainly due to the lack of resources
and staff and their uneven distribution throughout the country.
Patients have to wait hours in line before being seen in the regularly packed emergency
rooms, and sometimes even outside when there is no more space. The Hospital São
Paulo, for instance, one of the four biggest in a city of 11 million people, sees nearly 6000
patients per day.
The product developed aims at assisting hospital staff by providing a flexible and fast
reception for patients, digitally collecting their data and communicating with the hospital’s
database and proper sectors. The equipment can be easily carried around creating mobile
triage points whenever the hospitals demands, minimizing infrastructure issues.
2
early development
Following the research steps initial sketches and storyboards for the planned scenarios of the experience during triage in hospitals were drawn and redrawn as several quick tests happened, thus allowing ideas to be revisited and new ones to take the lead.
At the end of this stage the main components of the equipment were established: a
screen based device, a thermometer and a blood pressure meter.
3
development of the physical components
4
preliminary foam models
Development continued with blue foam modelling, which was very helpful for testing different
shapes for the devices and analysing ergonomics factor.
5
development of the digital interface
As a touchscreen device its interface is the most important part, and was developed to make the tasks as quick as possible through interactive page transactions and simple use of gestures. Typing was avoided at most, but it is still possible for it allows more flexibility, although the auto-fill capability is necessary to make it practical.
Low fidelity paper prototypes were followed by interactive on-screen tests.
