Towards a quieter neonatal intensive care unit: evaluating and visualizing soundscapes to raise awareness on sound-producing events

A soundscape is the acoustic environment that is constantly surrounding us. Soundscapes in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) might adversely affect neonates, their families, and healthcare providers. In this unit, the number of alarms and nuisance is very high, and studies show that it negatively affects both the well-being of patients and...

Design guidelines towards humanization and Artificial Intelligence in the Intensive Care Unit

This report describes a graduation project for the MSc program Strategic Product Design. The client in this project is the Erasmus MC in the Netherlands and commissions this project incorporation with the Critical Alarms Lab (CAL) of the TU Delft. The Erasmus MC and CAL want to improve the experience of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) both for...

Predicting Intensive Care Unit Readmission: Performance and Explainability of Machine Learning Algorithms

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) readmission is a serious adverse event associated with high mortality rates and costs. Prediction of ICU readmission could support physicians in their decision to discharge patients from the ICU to lower care wards. Due to increasing ICU data availability, Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in the form of machine...

CareTunes for Families: Connecting ICU Patients and Their Families through Music

CareTunes for Families is a product-service system that connects Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients and their families through music. Families of ICU patients often experience distress and anxiety. They have the need for information, closeness, assurance, hope, control, and the need to support the patient. These emotional and social needs point...

Tailored non-invasive ventilation masks for paediatric intensive care

This project aims to develop tailored non-invasive ventilation (NIV) masks for children in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), to offer suitable masks and to improve the NIV intervention. In the PICU, there is a preference for NIV compared to invasive ventilation, because of complications, such as airway injuries. Their biggest challenge...

Facilitating the transition towards desired behaviour in the ICU

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum (LUMC) focuses on vitally threatened patients, who cannot survive without daily intensive treatment. As the patients in this department could easily deteriorate and (potentially) pass away, the staff members of LUMC’s ICU often need to act rapidly and make decisions within a...

Overcome: Reducing ICU patients' anxiety through medical alarms feedback provision

In the Intensive Care Units (ICU) patients are exposed to many, continuous and highly stressors, such as medical alarms, which contribute to the development of psychological issues, such as delirium, anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). These psychological issues have a negative influence on the patients’ healing process...

The art of handing over: Improving the patient handovers at the ICU by human-centred design

This graduation project aimed to enhance the patient handovers at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) by design based on experienced qualities and pain points by the ICU team, existing of doctors and nurses. At the ICU, care is delivered by multidisciplinary healthcare teams who strongly rely on teamwork and communication. Patient handovers are...

A New Hybrid Predictive Model to Predict the Early Mortality Risk in Intensive Care Units on a Highly Imbalanced Dataset

Due to the development of biomedical equipment and healthcare level, especially in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), a considerable amount of data has been collected for analysis. Mortality prediction in the ICUs is considered as one of the most important topics in the healthcare data analysis section. A precise prediction of the mortality risk...

Sound Cultures of Critical Care: How design could tune sound-related practices of intensive care nurses

The intensive care unit (ICU) is a special department of the hospital that admits critically ill patients who need intensive monitoring, supporting, and/or take-over of one or more of their vital functions. The patients are monitored and supported by medical equipment as well as a team of intensivists, nurses and other medical staff members 24/7...

Sparkling Moments: Reducing chances of developing post intensive care syndrome amongst pediatric patients and their parents by enabling daily special interactions

In recent years, it has become clear that many ex-patients and their families suffer from new or worse health problems after discharge from an intensive care unit. These problems, which are the result of a traumatic experience at the intensive care, are grouped under the diagnosis post intensive care syndrome (PICS). This research focuses on the...

A persuasive game design solution: Stress reduction among neonatal nurses

This report presents the development of Interactive Mood, a digital solution that raises awareness of stress among neonatal nurses and stimulates social support within the team. It is part of the graduation project for the master Design for Interaction at the Delft University of Technology and was carried out on behalf of the Erasmus MC-Sophia...

Being happier being quieter; reducing noise in the Intensive Care Unit through behavior change of staff

Noise reduction in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is an important goal as it impacts the health and comfort of the critically ill patients as well as the health and concentration of staff. Research shows that a considerable amount of noise produced in the ICU can be influenced by ICU staff. However, until now there are no interventions that...

Human-centered environment design in intensive care unit

Because of high risk and instability of the patients in Intensive care unit(ICU), the design of ICU is very difficult. ICU design, auxiliary building design, lighting design, noise control and other aspects can also enhance its management. In this paper, we compare ICU design in China and Holland based on related standards. We also premeditate...

Role-based support for intensive care nursing: A designer's perspective

Design goals and design directions are formulated for the (digital) support of non-technical nursing tasks and skills in the intensive care unit (ICU), such as organizing work, evaluating care, coping with stress and dealing with poor team dynamics. A conceptual framework for ICU nursing was developed that provides product developers with a...

Next generation equipment in the intensive care unit: Data collection for design guidelines

Introducing intelligent systems into intensive care unit: A human centred approach