Mediana Patient monitor (Hawk) UI/GUI Development

The ward already knew how to read a patient monitor. The risk in redesigning one is not that the new screen is worse — it is that it is different.

A patient monitor gets read by people who are not looking at it. A nurse crossing the ward takes a number in and keeps walking. A doctor glances at it mid-sentence. That reading is not learned from a manual — it accumulates over years, on whatever machine the ward happens to own, and a new design inherits all of it.

So the first decision was not what to change. It was what to leave alone. Which readings hold their position no matter what else moves. How an alarm reaches someone who is facing the other way. And where the existing way of working is genuinely inconvenient, as opposed to merely unfamiliar to whoever is redesigning it.

We kept the learned environment and changed only where the inconvenience was clear, one function at a time. Units, colours and symbols were set against international standards rather than preference. On a device like this a colour is not a matter of style — it is the thing someone acts on.