CommuniCare

Improving patient experience in hospitals for non-verbal patients.

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Inspiration

Often times, hospital patients don't have the capacity to communicate verbally with nurses or healthcare assistants. Personal needs such as food, water, toilet, repositioning etc. are difficult to communicate without words, and if overlooked, greatly impact quality of care. Unless the nurse/healthcare assistant is familiar with the patient and understands how they communicate, this can become a serious issue. There is currently no system in place (at our local hospital) for patients to communicate non-verbally. We talked to a registered nurse who explained that in the past, she's had to write down phrases on a piece of paper and have the patient point to it.

What it does

CommuniCare is a communication board for patients to communicate non-verbally to nurses and healthcare assistants. It comes with an IR remote containing various buttons the patient can press (a legend is provided to the patient to indicate which buttons do what):

  • 0 - "No"
  • 1 - "Yes"
  • 2 - "Bathroom"
  • 3 - "Hungry"
  • 4 - "Thirsty"
  • 5 - "Reposition"
  • 6 - Call caregiver
  • 7 - Report a pain scale
  • 8 - Report a satisfaction scale
  • 9 - "Oops" (if the patient accidently presses the wrong button)

CommuniCare also logs the patient's commands along with the timestamp so nurses/healthcare assistants can reference them for their charting or progress notes. It also allows the hospital to collect data for quality assurance purposes.

How we built it

We built this project using the following components:

  • Arduino Uno R3
  • IR Remote Control
  • IR Receiver Module
  • LCD1602 Module

A tablet and app could accomplish the same goal, but a mini LCD display and IR remote is far cheaper and is sufficient for the problem we are addressing.

Challenges we ran into

There were many features we wanted to implement but couldn't because our Arduino did not have WiFi compatibility (see next steps).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first time working with hardware so we're proud to have gotten a working prototype!

What we learned

We learned a lot about Arduino and hardware! We also learned how an IR remote works and how to repurpose an existing IR remote.

What's next for CommuniCare

After this hackathon, we intend to upgrade to an ESP32 and use its WiFi capabilities to store the patient logs onto a text file or database. In our demo, the patient logs were displayed on the serial monitor since we did not have a WiFi module. We also plan to use the WiFi capabilities to extend CommuniCare to a caregiver setting and implement an option for patients to alert their caregivers via push notification/SMS (through PushingBox and PushBullet) if they are not present. Lastly, other improvements we can make are allowing phrases to be customizable to the patient, or supporting multiple languages.

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