Doc+ IOT Solution for Hospitals

Background

The pandemic has changed how modern healthcare works. Doc+ is a unified app for patient healthcare and management for hospitals and patient’s attendants for getting live updates about the patient’s health and vitals using IOT based health monitoring systems. The application saves time and miscommunication between the nurses and the doctors which makes the operations of a hospital more efficient and the treatment more efficient.

1. Problem Statement

Inefficient healthcare for patients in hospitals due to the impact of the pandemic on the healthcare system.

In my personal experience, my whole family got Covid-19. My father had the worst of it and was admitted to one of the best private hospitals in Delhi. I was the only person who could visit him while he was admitted and the patient’s attendants are not allowed to meet the patient physically. Instead, they let the patient video call their family 2 times a day for 2–5 minutes.

It was stressful for me and my family to get an update on my father’s health since the doctor could only call the patient’s family once a day to update about the patient’s health. This took a toll on my mental health because my father was in the ICU and every second was like a nightmare for me because Covid had taken a lot of lives and knowing that my father is doing well constantly would keep me at peace.

Luckily my father recovered after a month in the ICU and I promised myself I would find a solution for this gap which could have been easily been filled with the technology we have today if the patient’s family could just be updated on the patient’s health more often and communicate with the hospital remotely since being in the hospital around more people could.

2. Research

The research included a study from multiple hospitals and patients across the country and how things have changed in hospitals after the world was struck by COVID-19.

The pandemic has put lives of people working in the healthcare sectors at risk. This includes people that work as doctors/nurses/helpers in the hospitals who come in direct contact with various viruses and bacteria on a daily basis.

All doctors have more patients than they can manage on a daily basis because of the pandemic and that increases the chances for error and miscommunication.

Senior doctors who are guiding the treatment of the patient do not come in direct contact with the patients and rely on information from nurses and junior on-duty doctors for important information like the patients vitals and reports. This information is often miscommunicated which results in delay in treatment or non-effective treatment for the patient.

Patient’s attendants visit the hospital at least 2–3 times a day which makes the hospitals more crowded and social-distancing gets difficult in such a situation.

3. The opportunity I saw

To make an application where a doctor can constantly monitor all patients and their reports and a patient’s attendant can get updates about the patient without having to constantly be in the hospital.

5. Ideating on a chair in a hospital

Since this project was focused primarily on developing the idea, I made quick sketches to convey the idea of the app and how it’d work on a piece of paper while sitting in the hospital waiting for an update on my father’s health.

How it looked!

Learnings From Project

• The first and foremost thing I learned was the importance of self-initiated projects, they teach you a lot and grow you as a designer.
• The importance of empathy. I know this only happened because I was actively involved in the whole situation, but it made me grow emotionally as a human.
• Humans miscommunicate a lot. Clear communication is critical in a healthcare setup, which I saw was missing in hospitals.
• Designing for healthcare is challenging since each country has its own regulations regarding healthcare systems.