A wearable sensor for patients discharged from hospital that allows clinicians to look after them in the first important days at home. Convalescing and elderly patients often struggle with electronic devices that require Bluetooth pairing, pin codes or charging for example. Healthdot is a wearable sensor designed so patients do not need to do anything to make it work, allowing them to focus on their recovery. Connecting directly and securely to the cloud ensures reliable remote patient monitoring. As an unobtrusive rounded off white box, the shape of the Healthdot also expresses the simplicity of the design.

Clinicians know a lot about patients when they are in hospital but as soon as patients leave the door clinicians don't know anything. Still complications happen also at home and Healthdot provides the heart rate and respiration data that allows clinicians to detect if patients at home need attention. However this only works if patients can handle the technology they get provided (initial research showed that traditional solutions were in 20-40% of the cases not usable!). This is where Healthdot created a breakthrough in usability whereby patients don't need to do anything, resulting in reliable remote patient monitoring.

The shape of the Healthdot also expresses the simplicity of the design. An unobtrusive rounded off white box. Still the essence of the idea is not about the product design. Other products look fine as well but they never show all the 'stuff' around the product which is needed to make it work (the mobile phone, app, charger, sticky notes to remember PIN codes, etc.). That 'stuff' was the real problem and that is what this design wanted to eliminate.

Original design assignment was aimed at making it easy to do Bluetooth pairing, charging, PIN code handling and provide clear instructions. Interesting was that Design stepped beyond these traditional areas and used the usability research to convince the engineering department to make a radical change in technology to eliminate these hurdles altogether. Resulting in a product which is super easy to use because patients don't need to do anything.

The use case of keep looking after patients when they are out-side the hospital is relatively new and fully in line with the Philips vision of the 'continuum of care'.

Also the chosen solution to create an accurate sensor that sends its data directly to the cloud (via LoRa IoT technology, through low power wide area (LPWA) networks) without the need of phone or bridge is unique to the world and making it super easy to use for patients delivering on the Philips brand promise of 'Innovation for You'.

Impact:

Looking after patients, also when they are at home improves the quality of care because complications at home can be noticed in a more early state. Save remote patient monitoring (RPM) also allows for earlier discharge which reduces the pressure on the healthcare system which is even accelerated by the need to look after COVID-19 patients at home. Still RPM only works if the (elderly) people at home are able to deal with the technology. Healthdot is a breakthrough in usability enabling this change.