UX design may help individuals live better lives. Working as a UX designer in the healthcare business raises the stakes even higher. According to Grand View Research, the medtech sector is one of the world’s fastest expanding, with revenues estimated to reach $1,305.1 billion by 2030. As a UX designer, you can help influence the future of healthcare.
Although many hospitals and physicians are resistant to innovation, change in this area is inevitable. New technologies are permeating all digital health solutions, from symptom checkers and appointment scheduling apps to electronic health records and online drug ordering. Good UX/UI for medical devices makes any platform more convenient and accessible, creating a positive user experience.
Wearable devices in medicine
According to Business Insider, using wearable technology can save doctors up to 15 hours a week. According to IDC forecasts, in 2021, 7 out of 10 bracelet manufacturers will rely on algorithms for recognizing ailments, including viral infections and COVID-19. For example, scientists from the Mount Sinai Clinic in New York and Stanford have already taught Apple Watch to diagnose COVID-19 by heart rhythm.
In the competition for users, interface convenience comes to the fore. What does this mean for designers? They must prioritize factors like as simplicity, usefulness, connection with other programs, ease of storage, and interaction with the primary device.
Chatbots in medicine
Chatbots in medical institutions are becoming increasingly common. Of course, AI-based virtual assistants cannot make a diagnosis, but they can make an appointment for a patient or connect them with a doctor of the right profile.
In the future, the capabilities of chatbots will expand: for example, they will be able to provide personalized recommendations on health care. For UX/UI designers, this means that chatbots now need to be built into the prospect of regular communication with a person, given that they will process personal data and data that is a medical secret.
Design of AR and VR systems
Augmented reality and virtual reality are used to teach medical experts as well as to cure certain diseases: they improve diagnostic accuracy, divert patients from uncomfortable operations, and help visualize various human systems. For example, in Canada they have developed an augmented reality system called ProjectDR: it allows you to display computed tomography images or MRI data directly on the patient’s body.
In this case, a separate task for designers is to develop the most accurate, realistic, and reliable interfaces and visualizations.
Inclusive Design
Human society today is increasingly permeated with the ideas of inclusiveness and creating equal opportunities for people to use infrastructure, environment, and technology. Today in the field of UX/UI of medical systems this is the biggest challenge: if the system is designed for voice interaction, then what about people who cannot speak? And if it’s tactile and sensory, then what about those who have limited mobility of their limbs? After all, the main users of medical systems are often people with various health limitations.
In the future, inclusive UX/UI will be at the forefront of any medical development: specialists will have to simplify interfaces as much as possible and make them accessible to both tactile and voice, and even eye contact and control.
Telemedicine
According to Deloitte, the number of virtual medical consultations will reach 400 million globally by 2021. Medical systems that enable wearable devices to communicate data and doctors to issue electronic prescriptions following remote consultations necessitate extensive effort by UX/UI designers on service and application integration.
Indeed, a lot will depend on UX/UI design in the development of MedTech solutions. For them to serve people, all of the above principles must be taken into account when developing: such solutions must be quite simple and convenient, easily exchange data with each other, and take into account different ways of entering information and the needs of people with different health conditions.
Conclusion
The pandemic has accelerated the development of medtech solutions: remote monitoring of patient conditions, smart wearable devices, robotization of some processes, and AI. Because of this, UX/UI specialists and developers of medtech systems have a new difficult task – to create human-centric designs for complex and specialized solutions.
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