Design really is a Learning Process
As our team is coming along with our final medical design project, I have really learned how important it is to have outside ‘consultants’ and differing viewpoints. Specifically for our group, it has been a very iterative and ever-changing process. It is so important to pay attention to all the details you see and hear while observing in the hospital and brainstorming ideas for our design.
Personally, I really enjoy the brainstorming aspect of this project. I like listing off random ideas and coming up with weird or unthought of solutions to known problems. Compiling these ideas and going through the pros and cons of each is just really interesting. Then our group eventually narrowed down our list of ideas to five different ones, including an inflatable device, a waterbed with flow, a modular blanket device, a mechanical pulley system, and a monitoring system. The inflation idea seemed the most promising to us as a group, while the monitoring system was more or less just an extra idea that took a different approach to the problem of positional plagiocephaly in sedated infants. The main reasons we liked these ideas is that they were automated, fairly simple, and freed up the nurses time.
So we recently decided to take these ideas and run them by a few nurses in the PICU. While at first the nurses seemed to like our ideas, we eventually found that a few of the nurses weren’t particularly fond of an automated system. This sentiment was shared by the majority of the long-time nurses at the hospital. It turns out that they like to have a reason to go into the room and physically touch the patients. One particular nurse was worried about nurses getting lazy because of automation. There was definitely the feeling that yes, automation would simplify their day, but it is their job to physically interact with their patients and constantly check up on them. This is especially important in intensive care units, which is part of our patient population criteria.
However, there was more positive feedback about a monitoring system of some sort for the patients’ cribs. The nurses liked the idea because they still could physically touch the patient while possibly improving their current care. Therefore we have currently been prototyping and altering our need statement to better align with a monitoring based solution since we originally did not anticipate we would explore this idea any further. Ultimately we have changed directions and have a very different perception of the need now, as opposed to our first observations. There has been a lot more iterations and changes to our idea than we expected, but I think that’s what design is all about.
BME Design 