Sound-driven Relaxation APP Design for Nurses
Project Type
Individual Project (Master Graduation)
Project Cooperation
Critical Alarms Lab, TU Delft & Sen Sound Inc.
Time Range
03.2021 - 09.2021
All the content and visual layout on this page were reorganized after the project individually.
Sound-driven relaxation experience for nurses to overcome daily working stresses in the hospital.
takeUthere digital product introduced a sound-driven experience in which nurses can enjoy short-term relaxation during the work break in the hospital. It provides detailed sound from a daily office object. The user needs to find it and scan it on the APP. Then it delivers a fantastic charming scenario with 360-degree panorama visuals cooperating with relaxing scenario music. The final design includes APP user experience design, panorama visual design, and scenario sound editing. Moreover, it successfully convinced 8 participants with its unique fun experience. It shows the values for further development possibilities and improvement ideas. It also concluded new implementation opportunities areas followed by future recommendations.
The main research method in this project is online workshop co-creation with hospital stuffs from Reinier de Graff Gasthuis in Delft.
In this design description video, you can have a quick understanding of my final design about the initial problem, design solution, and user experience on sounds, visuals, and interfaces.
Scan an object —— Object-related background relaxing music —— Panorama visual —— A relaxed and calm mood
takeUthere experience starting from nurses' work shift or break during the day. Away from the stressful working schedule and tense atmosphere in the ward, nurses can finally have a short relief by entering the office room and have a short rest. Then he/she can open the takeUthere APP on the smartphone.
The APP will introduce 3 different sections and show them on the bottom navigation bar, Daily, Scan, and Footprint, which stands for the daily sonic challenge, take me there scanning, and my footprint review. The nurse can choose which section to continue the APP journey.
User Flow
First-time usage —— Key features introduction
Daily Sonic Trip - a sound guessing game
Object scanning confirmation pages (4 demo)
Panorama visual for the scanned objects - GIF images (audio in the design details section)
The other two main sections in the APP
The project management is mainly focus on the double-diamond design model. Phase 1 is Research, Analyse & Ideate. Phase 2 is Deeper exploration, Prototyping & Testing. In the design process, 6 parts are introduced to structure the process. Here claims the purpose of each process and result.
“In the hospital, all the attention falls on the patients.”
Nurses in the hospital always experience sensory overload during working hours. Personal mental health cannot be secured means more chances to make mistakes in normal work. However, the lack of awareness and appropriate methods to recover their senses increase the high-pressure conditions.
Researches from Critical Alarms Lab in TU Delft focus on sound-related areas in the context of complex environments such as factory cockpit, hospital. With the support of Yoko K. Sen from Sen Sound Inc. in the United States. The overall design challenge will be to create an interactive experience through sound and music for nurses to overcome the stressed mind in the work.
Within the assignment, I aim to explore how to use sound/music as a medium to deliver positive interaction, therefore bringing positive attitudes towards daily missions and releasing working pressure for nurses.
Refer to Fundamental Psychological Needs from Pieter M.A. Desmet presents 13 needs and sub-needs in normal people’s daily lives. The diagram shows a clear understanding of my project direction, and how sound and interaction will use in the design project to suit the needs.
Nurse’s work in a Dutch Hospital
In the Netherlands, nurses have a more focused working environment. The main stakeholders around nurses and the basic structure can be seen in the image on the right. Nurse need to balance the needs and orders from different people.
During their daily work, they need to
conduct treatments with colleagues
patrol regularly in different wards
attend meetings with team and physicians
communicate with patients and their relatives.
The consequence is that they lack of real feeling of control, receiving the input from others and giving their support just follow the rules. The nurses need to work together as a team and deal with people issues all the time.
The stressors that nurses need to balance daily in the hospital can be classified into 3 perspectives, Personal issue, Responsibility from Work, and Working Structure.
The personal issue contains the nurseʼs personality and personal experiences. Sometimes personal health, preferences and inadequate preparation will also affect the attitude towards daily work.
From the Responsibility from Work perspective, as nurses always need to follow the treatment instruction from the head nurse and physicians, sometimes they may feel uncertain about the order. Facing different types of patients and treatments, the workload will obviously increase the working stress of nurses. However, during the treatment or walkaround inspection in the ward, the patientʼs emotional and physical reaction will indirectly change the nurseʼs mood.
Ethical consideration plays an important role in both the Personal Issue and Responsibility from Work perspectives. Working Structure is more external factors, such as unequal information sharing between other colleagues, lack of support, or other issues.
Stakeholder Map
Nurses’ stressors
Music/Sound, and Relaxation
Scientific Evidences:
A positive mood makes people more willing to support and show empathy.
Different types of music can bring different results to human biological indicators.
Nature sounds make people concentrate on outward direction and pay less attention to themselves.
Activities distracting, sensory soothing, etc. will help people relax.
Opportunities:
Maintaining a positive mood not only benefits nurses' mental health but also has value to keep on their nursing work.
Soft, slow tempo music and nature sounds will affect a person’s brain waves and reduce stress and lower the heart rate.
Modest, soothing, or even micro-state of physical interaction with a balance between information offering and receiving brings an effective way of relaxation.
The user research has 3 parts, user interview, context observation and co-creation workshop observations and homework tasks.
The user interview is a basic understanding from general working people about music and sound, work, and relaxation. The purpose of the interview is for defining the emotional status that people maintain for normal work and understanding how music affects people by passively interacting with it daily.
The co-creation workshop is under the topic research from the project Mentor, Dr. Stefano Delle Monache about better sleep for patients in a ward environment with Reinier de Graff Gasthuis in Delft, the Netherlands. The workshop is cooperating with physicians, nurses, and hospital supervisors, from daily sonic awareness in the hospital to better sleep solutions for patients.
As COVID-19 lockdown affects the whole design process. It was a fortune to have this opportunity to contact real users and discuss, research, and learn from them. The researcher hold small activities for them to research nursesʼ stressors, sonic environment, and the real context in the hospital. Context observation helps me to understand the work load, flow and user behaviors.
Preliminary Interview
The user interview was conducted in 2 days with 5 people age 21-27. As the purpose of the short interview is to discover the basics of sonic awareness in order to prepare the further workshop research, the participants are only peer students and normal office workers. The interviews were finished via the online platform, Zoom, and face-to-face interviews.
Insights:
People DO notice sounds around them daily, but try not to be distracted by them.
Music is a common habit of people. Different activities affect choosing the music genre.
The emotional status of facing tasks is common: maintaining a Clam and neutral mood are important.
Opportunities:
Passively received sounds/music may have negative effects on people. Active control and creation are potential.
Due to the context in the hospital, creating a calming experience for the senses is more valuable than changing the emotion, as nurses only have a limited period of time to have an interactive solution during working hours.
For working people, trying to keep a balance between a calming experience and a sleepy experience is extremely important. Too relaxing will bring a dull status to face at work. Maintaining a certain rate of engagement and joy is the potential to avoid boredom yet relaxing.
Quick sketch from context observation (re-organized)
Context Mapping from Co-creation Workshop
9 hospital workers, including nurses, physicians, and hospital supervisors.
3 online sessions to raise awareness and send tasks, 1 final session to co-create solutions.
6 tasks about hunting sounds and behaviors about stressful, relaxing and playful/joyful.
The workshop Better Sleep with RdGG hospital in Delft, the Netherlands was held online and had 2 sections. The first section is helping hospital workers to become more aware of the soundscape around them, both in the working environment and in their personal lives, in order to gradually become sensitive about the sleeping environment for themselves, also for patients in the ward. Then the second section is thinking about solutions for the hospital to increase the sleeping experience in the ward.
My role in the workshop was mainly for the first section, sonic awareness, by introducing tasks for participants to finish for the coming weeks after the workshop - Sound Hunter. The 6-days activity focuses on stressful, relaxing, and playful sound awareness and hospital workerʼs individual behaviors. It is an online activity via the WhatsApp platform with support from the Critical Alarm Lab team.
Rich data were collected after the research. Key results can be found here.
Rich research data was collected after the context-mapping process.
Key results:
Stressful feelings are always related to personal experiences but have an overwhelming mood in common.
Nurses do feel stressed during work, but theyʼve already got used to it.
Sound is not always for one group of people, it will affect other people.
Nurses donʼt want to hear sounds similar to the working environment.
Uncontrollable and unpredictable sounds increase the feeling of stress.
Relaxing sound means silence with a slight background white noise for them.
People tend to do tasks that are simple/easy to handle for relaxation.
Online workshop session 2 with hospital workers.
Design Vision
Introduce a joyful product experience in which nurses can actively interact/create sonic stories, in order to give them a short-term engaging relaxation moment.
Design Goals
Ideation
Brainstorming(How-might-we), Visual Mindmap, WWWH methods were used to generate ideas based on the design vision and goals. 3 different concepts were introduced. Combining the advantages and disadvantages each concepts, and meetings with my project cooperation team supervisors, we finally determined a comprehensive design plan.
Final Concept
Scan an object —— Object-related background relaxing music —— Panorama visual —— A relaxed and calm mood
Product System Logic
Based on the final concept, I developed the concept into a solid user interface design solution by detailing the product system logic chart below.
Key Technologies in the Design
Small experiments to find out technical implementing requirements
Objects for scanning in nurses’ office
As the design concept is scanning objects in the nurses’ office, finding potential objects and designing matched audiovisual is a requirement. 4 objects were selected to make design demo presentation: plants, office chair, coffee cup, window.
Audiovisual Design
Object: Office chair
Scenario: Space Odyssey on office chair
Audiovisual experience:
(Successfully Scanned Confirmation)
(UI shows only a dark background with a tag card on the front. With the iconic object sound occurring, it shows a short story in text……)
(Object Confirmation Short Story: )
Phew…… You found an office chair and are sitting on it right now. You spin around, and then it takes you to a mysterious spaceship. Outer space has so many things to be explored. Look around and enjoy your journey.
(Chair sound)
(User press the confirmation button and it shows a space panorama view) (satellite and planets in the first sight, look at the back, the user will see some unexpected creatures. See below for the final panorama visual.)
Object: Coffee Cup
Scenario: Vacation on the Coffee Beach
Audiovisual experience:
(Successfully Scanned Confirmation)
(UI shows only a dark background with a tag card on the front. With the iconic object sound occurring, it shows a short story in text……)
(Object Confirmation Short Story: )
Relax…… You had a taste of your coffee and closed your eyes. Your coffee cup is bringing you to a beach, where the ocean is made by Cappuccino. Youʼre relaxing on the towel with the beach vibe, enjoy the coffee smell with a deep breath at the same time.
(Stirring coffee sound)
(User press the confirmation button and it shows a beach panorama view) (Boat and coffee sea at first sight. Look at the back, there are coconut trees. The user will see a towel and slippers, and a cup of coffee. See below for the final panorama visual.)
Object: Plant
Scenario: Camping inside of the Plant
Audiovisual experience:
(Successfully Scanned Confirmation)
(UI shows only a dark background with a tag card on the front. With the iconic object sound occurring, it shows a short story in text……)
(Object Confirmation Short Story: )
Wow…… You were just looking at the plant in your room and suddenly shrink and hid inside of it. You decide to go camping there with your RV. You are enjoying the mild wind, campfire and gradually feel relaxed.
(Walking through grasses sound)
(User press the confirmation button and it shows a space panorama view) (satellite and planets in the first sight, look at the back, the user will see some unexpected creatures. See below for the final panorama visual.)
Object: Window
Scenario: Flying with fishes in the sky
Audiovisual experience:
(Successfully Scanned Confirmation)
(UI shows only a dark background with a tag card on the front. With the iconic object sound occurring, it shows a short story in text……)
(Object Confirmation Short Story: )
Creak…… You opened the window and your mind was flying above the sky. Fly to the top of the buildings and breathe the air above. You see fishes are flying around you. Relax and enjoy your moment.
(Window opening sound )
(User press the confirmation button and it shows a beach panorama view) (Boat and coffee sea at first sight. Look at the back, there are coconut trees. The user will see a towel and slippers, and a cup of coffee. See below for the final panorama visual.)
8 people
21-29 years old
Students and office workers
The evaluation used Sketch hotspots connected with iPhone to simulate the usage of takeUthere APP. Started from the introduction of background, participants experienced the daily sonic trip, scan random objects, and review footprints function. They filled in the questionnaire after the test. I conducted short interviews according to the questionnaire.
Main Results:
Interesting to guess office objects through sound. Not hard to find, yet challenging.
Rich-detailed visual and music to be explored more than once.
The audiovisual evokes the positive side of personal memories well and successfully distracts people’s minds in a short time.
People tend to focus more on the panorama visuals and stories the first time, but focus on music more in the review section.
A stressless gamified experience like treasure hunting, but not complex.
Enjoy the process of imaging with the music and visuals, even closing eyes.
The experience not only offers short-term relaxation but also increases the expectation of life after hours.
