Table, not tiles.
- One row per room, read in one fixation
- One screen, not six
- One click to live video
Before: a page per room, a separate alerts console, video in a third tool.
Case study 01Healthcare AI
care.aiSeeing every room is easy. Deciding what a nurse sees is the design.
Ambient AI that watches every hospital room, so nurses and sitters see only what deserves them.
- RoleCreative Director, UX/UI Design Lead
- Years2018 – 2026
- PlatformConsole, wall, mobile, tablet
- StatusAcquired by Stryker, 2024
01The moment
One nurse. Six patients. Twelve hours.
At 2:40 AM a post-surgical patient gets out of bed alone. Confused from pain medication, he will not press the call button.
PatientNurseOut of bed, no call
2:40 AM
the critical moment
1
patient, recently post-surgical
1
nurse, two rooms away
0
calls. He does not press the button.
Nothing about that moment is unusual.
02The problem
Seeing everything is the easy part.
An AI that sees everything drowns a nurse in alerts, unless the interface decides what deserves her attention. That was the brief.
The brain learns to filter them out, and filters out the real one too.
Industry context, not results of this deployment. Figures as summarised by Nurse.org from published research.
03The approach
Decide what deserves a human.
01
The room reports events, never footage.
- Privacy is the default
- Video has to justify itself
02
Every event gets a tier.
- Set with clinical advisors
- Legible in under a second
03
Colour never travels alone.
- 1 in 12 men has a colour-vision deficiency
- Every status: a word and an icon
Tier colours and event examples from the product’s semantic palette. Icons are the production webfont.
04The flow
One event. One language. Every surface.
The nurse station and the phone in her pocket show the same three states.
Detect
AMS-M2 sensor: an event, not footage.
Notified
Console and phone, same alert.
Acknowledged
One tap stops the escalation clock.
Drop in
Live video and two-way talk.
Resolved
Documentation is a by-product.
05Decisions that held
Five choices, and what they changed.
Rules live on the row.
- A popover, not a settings screen
- Next to the alerts they prevent
- Try it: open the gear, flip a rule
Peripheral alerts, not modals.
- Up to 16 rooms, 8 to 12 hours, dim light
- Pulse on the border. Wall #1A202C.
- A modal blinds the sitter to fifteen
The elapsed-time column.
- How long a task sat in its state
- A list becomes a bottleneck detector
- Pilots: stalled work visible without asking
A wheel, with a way back.
- Eight zones, not arrows
- Hub resets to the approved framing
- Try it: press a zone, then Reset
06The interface
Dense, calm, readable at a glance.
Each tab plays its own click-through. Click anything to take over.
Swipe the wall sideways
The live sitter wall plays itself. Click anything to take over.
The Ambient Monitoring console plays itself. Click anything to take over.
- 1One click to live video The Visual column opens the room feed in place.
- 2Status: icon and word Notified, Acknowledged and Resolved each carry an icon and a label, never colour alone.
- 3Rules on the row A gear opens the room’s rules without leaving the table.
The Command Center plays itself. Click anything to take over.
- 1Device state per room Four device icons per room. State is carried by colour and icon.
- 2Rules as chips FP and PT chips, cyan when a rule is on.
- 3Video call from the row Call state per room, one click away.
Virtual Care plays itself. Click anything to take over.
- 1Status in words Completed, Deferred, Overdue, In Progress, Scheduled.
- 2Elapsed time in state How long a task has sat in its current state, so stalled work shows itself.
- 3Call from the row Video call without leaving the list.
1Offline is a wordSensor state is a coloured word, so an offline room is never mistaken for a quiet one. Its Call button is greyed out.
2Primary action: talkThe first action is calling the patient, not opening the record.
3Not a smaller desktopEight desktop columns became three data points per card.
The mobile app plays itself. Click anything to take over.
The real product, three moments
The tabs above are the product redrawn as vector with demo data. Numbered marks point to the design decisions. Drill-downs, rules, calls and Drop In are illustrative behaviour. The strip below the tabs, and the hero, are real product screenshots with demo data.
07The system
One system for five distances.
A hallway sign at four metres and a phone in a corridor each got a step on one scale, never their own rules.
255 icons, one set
Hover an icon
- One versioned webfont
- The production font: every surface renders identical marks
- Drawn from the font’s own outlines, not an image
Colour is a clinical decision
- Act now: solid disc, fast pulse
- Acknowledge: ring, slow pulse
- Informational: plain ring
Try it: hover a row.
One type scale
- Room 412Door signage · 4 m
- Fall PreventionWall display · 2 m
- Bathroom AssistanceConsole · 60 cm
- Room 102 / Med Surg / Sacred HeartDense table
- AcknowledgedStatus, never smaller
How it was governed
- One library, one ownerA module could not fork a colour.
- Versioned in the fontNobody used last year’s set.
- Written downSpecs, not just design files.
- Reviewed before releaseA good argument changed the system.
State, in the product
- Devices: grey off, green on, red on alert
- Rules: cyan when on
The most valuable thing I left behind was not a screen. It was the rule that a nurse moving between four products should never have to ask what a colour means.
08Leadership
Designing the system meant designing the connections.
- AI/ML engineers
- Clinical advisors
- Solution architects
- C-suite
- Hospital clients
- Data-labelling team
- Front-end developers
- UI designers
Who I led
- UI designers
- Front-end developers
- Data-labelling team
Set quality benchmarks, ran UX review, mentored designers to own modules end to end.
Who I translated between
- AI/ML engineers
- Clinical advisors
- Solution architects
- C-suite
Each defines “done” differently. I held one definition across all four.
Where I defended it
- Executive reviews
- Hospital client sessions
- HIMSS
- MGMA
- HLTH
- NAHAM
Also art-directed the product films and animated walkthroughs used to sell the platform.
The recurring argument was less.
Engineering wants more detections, more data, more alerts. Alarm fatigue is what happens when nobody wins that argument.
09A correction
The call I got wrong.
I filed the AMS-H1 bedside unit as hardware. It is a complete patient app: thirteen screens for elderly users in assisted living and home care.
How I had been thinking
- Grouped work by device and platform
- Clinical density as the house style
- Bedside unit as a provisioning surface
- Information per square inch
What the patient app needed
- 150 × 150 pt tap targets
- Icon before text
- Full-screen confirmations
- Home on every screen
Try it: press Call a nurse.
A toast is correct by convention and wrong in practice. A frightened patient needs a whole screen: “Evelyn has been called to your room.”
I was categorising by device, not by user. Correcting that changed how I audit my own scope.
10Outcome
Acquired by Stryker.
care.ai now sits inside Stryker’s Smart Care business.
2024–2026
I stayed through the acquisition and into integration.
100+
deliverables accepted with minimal revision
Who runs on it, as published
Houston MethodistEnterprise rollout, from 2022
Henry Ford HealthVirtual nursing pilot, then enterprise-wide across 13 locations (Stryker)
Parkview HealthVirtual nursing and sitting
Customer programmes as published by those organisations and Stryker. Context for the scale the design had to survive, not a claim of individual credit.
What I took from it
- Restraint is a deliverable.
- Design for the user, not the device.
- A system is a rule people can rely on.
Good design is knowing what to leave out.
Sources: Nurse.org, care.ai announcement, Stryker completion, Stryker on Henry Ford. Product screens are redrawn as vector with demo data, except the hero and the real-product strip, which are screenshots with demo data; the live wall, drill-downs and Drop In are illustrative behaviour, not telemetry. WCAG 2.1 AA targeted, demos keyboard operable, motion off under reduced-motion.