The healthcare industry is one of the fastest-growing industries and has rapidly changed over the last decade. Increasing healthcare needs, technology advancements, and research have led to fast medical device adoption. These devices serve various purposes, including diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. All these come under the device/medical equipment’s functionality and are the top priority.
Apart from functionality, a medical device’s user interface also plays a crucial role in its ease-of-use, ensuring that doctors and patients have the best experience, thus making healthcare UX design more important these days.
As Healthcare professionals and biomedical engineers understand the importance of medical device user interfaces (UIs), the demand for medical equipment with smooth and efficient UIs has increased. As a result, manufacturers are under pressure to take on more extensive responsibilities and develop more smooth, efficient and user-friendly UIs for medical equipment and healthcare appliances that are atypical of smartphones or computers.
Click here – All You Need to Know Before Buying Any Electrical Equipment
Importance of UI in Heathcare industry
UI is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare industry for several reasons. First and foremost, UI plays a vital role in a healthcare product or service’s overall experience. A well-designed UI can make a healthcare product or service more intuitive and efficient, while a poorly designed UI can make it more difficult and frustrating.
In addition to improving UX, UIs can also help improve patient safety. By making information more visible and easily accessible, UIs can help clinicians avoid errors when providing care. In some cases, it can even offer decision support to clinicians, helping them choose the best course of action for their patients.
UIs can also help reduce costs by improving efficiency and reducing the need for training. When users can quickly and easily find what they need within a UI, they are less likely to cut-down time required for extensive training on how to use the system. This can lead to significant cost savings for healthcare organizations.
Just as in any other industry, UIs play an increasingly important role in healthcare. They are being used to streamline processes, improve communication and collaboration, and ultimately provide better care for patients.
Also Read : All You Need to Know Before Buying Any Electrical Equipment
Some of the ways UIs are being used in healthcare include:
EHRs/EMRs: UIs are being used to make electronic health records (EHRs) and electronic medical records (EMRs) more user-friendly. This is important because EHRs/EMRs are becoming the primary way that information is stored and accessed in healthcare.
Communication and collaboration: UIs are also being used to improve communication and collaboration among healthcare professionals. For example, many hospitals use a screen to display patient information at the bedside. This allows doctors and nurses to easily access information about a patient’s condition, medications, etc.
Also Read : Better grades can mean better auto insurance rates for teen drivers
Most encountered Challenges while designing a medical device UI
- A medical device must be powered by complex processors, such as NXP, Qualcomm, or Nvidia, to run algorithms at the edge to analyze sensor data or to create an intuitive Human-Machine Interface (HMI)
- The firmware application should be designed to send the sensor data to the mobile app or the cloud regularly
- Different governing bodies in different regions keep a check on medical devices; hence, they must meet some set of rules and standards before it comes into the market. The time to market for medical devices may be more to get approval than other products
- There should be limited use of the color palette of a user interface. The background and major on-screen components should be between three to four colors, while one-of-a-kind and small-scale elements may feature additional hues
- Users should be guided toward the most important information first by typographical guidelines, and the screen content should be easy to read
Click here – How To Unpublish Facebook Page
How to design Medical Device Interfaces which are more User-Friendly
Reduce Screen Density: This can be achieved via –
- Presenting secondary information on-demand via pop-ups or relocating it to other screens
- Reduce the amount of text
- Use simpler graphics like replacing 3-D icons with silhouette-styled ones
Create Visual Balance: Visual balance or symmetry should be created, especially on the vertical axis. So that it can be understood easily, and necessary actions can be taken within time.
Use Hierarchical Labels: Screens that are cluttered by redundant labeling take a long time to scan because they are congested. It may be inconvenient for healthcare professionals to display unnecessary indicators on a patient monitor, which summarizes the alarm levels associated with cardiac and blood pressure conditions. Hierarchical labels are best for Medical UI and solve this kind of problem.
Eliminate Inconsistencies: Design inconsistencies are incredibly toxic to user-interface appeal and usability and may compromise the safety of some medical devices. Also, healthcare UIs should be designed in such a way that users don’t have any difficulty locating frequently used functions.
To conclude, rich yet simple User Interfaces are the need of the hour to improve healthcare services. There has been a tremendous rise in the adoption of good UIs from the healthcare industry, but there is still a long way to go, as medical device UIs can play a crucial role in taking the industry to greater heights.