The Elements of a Hand Held Device for Nurse Access to Home Healthcare Monitors

Abstract

Home-based patient monitors have limited access for field nurses when they are away from their desktop computers and central monitoring station software. The major consequences of this are delayed responses to patient problems, possibly leading to less effective treatment. Further, nurses' laptops lack mobility and versatility, which often makes it difficult for them to quickly access patient information during a variety of tasks. Using nurse demographic information, requirements gathering, and observations from 15 nurses, a design concept for both a longer-term nurse hand held device with a touch screen interface, as well as a simple cellular telephone application that can receive SMS messages on patient problems from the central monitoring station were proposed. It was anticipated that after successful user testing with nurses on the simpler cellular telephone application, that a more capable application could be developed for their cellular telephones with the ability to send and receive information from the central monitoring station.