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Team ConFusion - Ubis, operating room safety

Team ConFusion - Ubis, operating room safety

Our goal is to create a device that helps the scrub nurse during the counting of the surgical instruments in all the surgical phases. It would also simplify the compilation of paperwork.

Our project initially focused on:

  • understanding the users involved in the use of the surgical kit
  • understanding in which processes the surgical kits are involved
  • understanding the dynamics of the hospital

Our interviews were focused on to people we know that have roles in the health field, and our goal was to better understand the processes involved in the kit and in looking for the problems related to its use or points of improvement.

We started to study more in deep to dynamics of the operating room, especially regarding the control and the counting of the instruments – and we started also to study our users’ needs. Among all the dynamics of the operating room, we found an interesting area of opportunity which is the way that the scrub nurse deals with the instruments. As she is the one who is responsible for all the instruments inside the operating room from setting them up before the operation starts to passing them also to the surgery.

Ubis is composed of two main parts: a wearable necklace (Ubis Necklace) and a supporting docking station (Ubis Dock)

In our system, the nurse wears a necklace the collects all the data about what is happening in the surgery room (i.e. the quantity and the kind of instruments counted) thanks to a camera and a microphone. Since the scrub nurse is the only person who is responsible for passing the instruments to the surgeon, the camera captures all the area that she is seeing.