Designing for Health: The Crucial Role of Medical Device UI/UX Design

Often, we are so accustomed to equating the medical profession with all that is functional and simple that we forget that all those beeping monitors are being used by people like us. People who appreciate and expect a good user experience, clarity, and quickness.

As technology becomes more and more embedded in the medical ecosystem, it has become critical to ensure that the multi-generational and multi-disciplinary professionals who use it are provided with a system that enables speed, understanding, and accuracy.

This is where medical device UI, or user interface design, comes into play.

What is Medical Device UI design?

Designing interfaces that put users at the heart of the process is critical for ensuring that medical institutions provide the best patient care and outcomes possible.

Medical device UX design refers to building medical devices that give their users an intuitive and error-free handling experience. It starts with analyzing how a device will be used, who will be using it, and under which circumstances. At a deeper level, it also takes into account the expectations, behaviors, and perceptions of its users. These insights then form the core of the principles that inform the interface design.

The goal is to make devices that simplify user interactions and enable them to achieve efficient results in stressful and time-constrained situations. Here are some well-known medical device interface design advantages:

The growing digitization of the healthcare and medical industries has increased the dependence on digital devices all across the healthcare sector. No medical department or sector has been left untouched by technology, making it imperative that professionals faced with a multitude of devices can manage them efficiently and with minimal training.

Enhancing Usability

Human-centered medical device design requirements are laser-focused on making these devices user-friendly in a medical setting. In high-pressure situations, ensuring devices come with intuitive and efficient interfaces can affect patient outcomes. Following the best practices of medical device UI/UX, manufacturers ensure that users can learn how to operate devices quickly, with less training, and manage them without any loss of time and hopefully with improved diagnosis accuracy.

Ensuring Patient Safety

The clarity of UI design in medical devices has a direct impact on patient safety. Inaccurate data entry, miscommunication, or misunderstanding of device readings can lead to medical errors, which can have serious implications for patient safety.

In critical healthcare settings, a monitor that gives information clearly and without any scope for confusion is a must.

Realizing the Potential of IoT and Wearable Devices

Medical device interface design also has clear value for the burgeoning homecare device segment, where non-medical users need more support and guidance to use the machines safely.

With emerging tech trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable health tech, medical device UI design must also consider consumer-grade devices. The challenge here is to create interfaces that are not only functional but also user-friendly enough for novices.

Reduce cognitive load

Over the years, the MedTech industry has slowly added different devices from a multitude of manufacturers. A thoughtful device interface can help professionals work faster on multiple monitors. An easy-to-read and consistent visual language, such as color coding and familiar iconography for the devices reduces mental load and improves efficiency.

Design best practices for user-friendly medical device interfaces.

We know how important a well-designed device interface is to the smooth functioning of the healthcare industry, but what is a good medical interface UI/UX, and how do you go about designing it?

Below, we’ve summarized eight industry best practices for designing medical device interfaces:

1. User-centered design process

Make sure to place the user at the center of your design process by thoroughly researching their needs, preferences, and limitations through methods like user persona creation, surveys, user journey mapping, and usability testing.

2. Keep it clutter-free 

Often, the need to cram information and data takes over the user interface and leads to an overloaded screen that makes it hard for people to find information quickly and accurately.

The key to providing error-free information on the go is to keep the design clean and clutter-free with simpler graphics, larger text, and focus on visual and contextual hierarchy in the content.

Trends to keep in mind while designing your medical device UI

While medical devices and their functionalities might not change at the breakneck speed associated with digital tech, they do get more complex as emerging technologies organically integrate with them over time. Here are some current technology and consumer trends that you should keep in mind while designing the UI for medical devices.

Biometric security

As data privacy and system security concerns rise, so do the conversations around safeguarding networked devices. Biometric security is already an established, easy-to-use, and tested security technology, and we will see a surge in including its features on medical devices.

Voice-activated or controlled interfaces

Voice-assisted devices such as Alexa and Siri have gained more than a foothold in our daily lives; more than one billion voice searches take place every month, and the number keeps increasing. The trend is now also well on its way to entering the medical ecosystem and devices, and the UI of the near future will have to consider voice queries as part of its design.

Conversational chatbots

Lately, NLP, or Natural language processing, has matured enough to make conversing with a chatbot reasonably natural, deeply informative, and quick. Chatbots are already being used in the healthcare industry to automate a lot of queries, and we will see this trend grow to include interactions with medical devices, between patients and automated systems, and for querying databases.