Overview
This project was completed for Live Interactive Ltd for a hospital in Saudie Arabia. The solution included a system to manage patients entrance system and help them navigate to their rooms, it also simulate an interactive system that is supposed to add entertainment aspect to the patients experience through an interactive wall that uses a set of Microsoft Kinect sensors that show object on the interactive wall that replicate the movement of the patients while they pass through. Finally, the project also included a virtual reality tour to show the effect of the system while the hospital was still being constructed.
The problem
The main problem was that in similar hospitals, staff struggled with patients losing their way and not knowing how to reach their consultation rooms, the hospital management needed a solution which requires the minimum staff involvement in this process. Furthermore, the management wanted to add a touch of entertainment in the hospital and they wanted us to be creative. Finally, to effectively show the project, we decided to create a VR tour that would illustrate our proposed solution.
P.S: due to confidentiality commitments, I can only show an early draft version of this project.
My role
My role was software development, product design and UX, reporting to the CEO.
Methods
Site Visits
This was conducted by my colleagues to get an overall understanding of the work of the staff at the hospital and to select member of staff who can participate in future activities
Interviews
We interviewed multiple members of staff in similar hospitals that belong to the same group to understand their challenges and how it is normally resolved.
Design workshops (remotely)
We conducted remote design workshops where we brainstorm ideas with the staff that we interviewed to create prototypes, and user journeys and usecase diagrams for the different groups of users such as the hospital staff and visiting patients.
The results were a design of a system that assist in calling the patients to their consultation rooms with maintaining full privacy, and the separation between male and female waiting and consultation rooms which is the norm is Saudie Arabia.
We identified 4 use cases of 4 different groups of users. Two users from each gender waiting rooms. One user has to access a control panel at the reception, and the other user would call the patient through the same control panel but from a different floor.
Regarding the interactive system, we introduced a kinect triggered interactive system which checks the hight of the passing people, then assess whether the passing people are males, females, or children and would show entertaining objects that match the input from the sensors. These objects would interact with the people passing by. The main aim of the system was to provide some form of entertainment near the waiting rooms where families and children can have some fun to ease the stress of hospital visits.
Challenges (examples)
Time and remote work:
Time constraints and remote work were the main challenges in this project. It caused many periods of uncertainity, however, we managed to keep the team motivated with continous communication and with the use of as much visuals as possible, hence we agreed on creating the VR tour.
Lack of previous team experience:
The team had not worked for solutions for health systems before. Thus, I conducted a simple market research where I created a presentation of 13 different interactive solutions for health services. The presentation included details of the systems, the companies, the aims, etc. This helped the team contextualizing themselves slowly in the context of health and hospital solutions.
The sensitivity of health solutions:
The nature of health systems is that they have to accommodate special cases and make sure not to cause any discomfort to anyone. For example, the interactive wall system uses the sensors and judge if there are children or not by height, but this is definitely not enough. As in hospitals, many patienst could be on wheeled chairs. And we definitely don't want to show childish content to adult patients passing by the area of the interactive system. This is one of many examples that we had to consider while creating and developing the system.
Implementation
Once the system design was confirmed, we submitted the designs to a partner who worked on the physical infrastructure of the system and procure the required equipment. Simultaneously, the VR tour was being created to simulate the same programs that we were working on.
The programming environment was using Unity 3D and C#, and using specific libraries for Ms Kinect, and some Unity pro libraries that made our work easier.
The whole concept with the resulted system design and software were delivered to Live Interactive so they can perform the final implementation with their partners in Saudie Arabia.
