Inspiration
Patients in the ICU often experience emotional isolation, fear, uncertainty, and limited social interaction. Nurses and families may notice these signs, but documenting loneliness in a structured way is not always easy during daily care.
NersCare ICU was created to support ICU nurses, research teams, and families with a simple digital workflow for loneliness assessment, scoring, interpretation, and education.
What it does
NersCare ICU is a web-based assessment and education system for ICU patient loneliness.
The system helps users to:
- Register ICU patient data.
- Check patient eligibility for assessment.
- Fill a structured loneliness questionnaire based on the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale.
- Calculate total loneliness score.
- Display loneliness category and dominant loneliness type.
- Separate emotional loneliness and social loneliness indicators.
- Store assessment history for follow-up.
- Provide educational content for nurses and families.
- Show a public loneliness calculator for educational simulation.
- Present an interactive booklet on the landing page.
How we built it
We built the application as a Laravel-based web application with a MySQL database. The system includes public pages, authenticated staff dashboards, patient management, assessment workflows, scoring logic, result history, educational content management, and PWA support.
The interface was designed to feel calm, clinical, and approachable for nurses, patients' families, and research administrators.
Challenges we ran into
One of the main challenges was translating a clinical loneliness scale into a clear digital workflow that remains easy to understand for non-technical users. We also had to make the system usable for different roles: admin, nurses, and families.
Another challenge was balancing the visual design. The application needed to look professional for research and clinical use, but still warm enough for families and public visitors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that the application already supports an end-to-end workflow: patient data, assessment, scoring, category interpretation, education, reporting support, and a public simulation page.
We also added an interactive booklet section so educational material can be presented in a more engaging way on the landing page.
What we learned
We learned that healthcare applications need more than functional forms. They need careful wording, simple flows, readable interfaces, and trust-building design. Small design decisions can affect whether nurses and families feel comfortable using the system.
What's next for NersCare ICU
Next, we plan to improve the clinical validation process, refine the questionnaire content after proofreading, add stronger reporting features, and explore AI-assisted recommendations for education and follow-up planning.
We also plan to improve mobile usability further because many nurses and family members may access the system from phones.
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