Our Client
’s mission is “to optimize hospital operations by providing solutions and services that achieve bottom line results to support the top priority of hospitals and health systems — efficiently providing patients the right care, at the right time, in the right place, with the right resources.”
Founded in 1991, TeleTracking pioneered automated patient flow management. Today, TeleTracking’s technology is helping hospitals improve efficiency by making better use of limited healthcare resources. Their technology reduces waste allowing hospitals to invest in improved patient care.
TeleTracking builds software that allows hospitals to operate more efficiently. Their software solutions touch every aspect of hospital operations. In particular, TeleTracking’s Orchestrate system helps hospitals track patients and improve flow in hospitals’ biggest revenue generator, their surgical departments.
MHCI + Our Project
The Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute is an inter-disciplinary community of students and faculty dedicated to research and education in topics related to computer technology in support of human activity and society. The master’s program is a rigorous 12-month curriculum in which students complete coursework in programming, design, psychology, HCI methods, and electives that allow them to personalize their educational experience. During their second and third semesters, the students participate in a substantial Capstone Project with an industry sponsor.
The Capstone Project course curriculum is structured to cover the end-to-end process of a research and development product cycle. Students work closely with an industry sponsor on new ideas or applications that may work with their existing human-to-machine technology. The goal of this 32-week course is to give each student the opportunity for a “real-life” industry project, similar to an actual experience in a research, design, and development setting. Company sponsors benefit from the innovative ideas produced by the students, to fix existing systems or reach into new markets.
Our Focus
Our project focuses on creating a HIPAA-compliant mobile application that provides meaningful status updates and interactions for families waiting for a loved one in surgery. The system should support family members waiting in the hospital as well family members wanting to monitor the patient’s status remotely.
Research
The research phase of the project took three months.

We traveled to 10 hospitals in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Research Methods
Design
Over three brainstorming sessions, we generated a total of 53 ideas.

We went through nine rounds of prototyping.
Low-Fidelity: Paper Prototypes are simple hand-drawn sketches of a concept. We started prototyping with paper because paper prototypes are cost-effective and easy to make. By presenting participants with these low-fidelity prototypes, we were able to get feedback focused on the functionality of the prototype rather than the design.
Mid-Fidelity: Interactive Wireframes were partially-interactive prototypes that test participants could use on a smart phone. We performed three rounds of testing with our mid-fi prototypes: one in a hospital and two in our lab. A total of sixteen participants tested these prototypes. We evaluated our designs using task-driven think-alouds and survey questions. The survey questions were used to evaluate the app’s effect on participant’s anxiety and obligation to stay in the waiting room. Additionally, we used card sorts to understand feature importance and we created our own Jeopardy! style exercise to clarify feature names.
High-Fidelity: Functioning App Our high-fidelity prototype was fully functional and fully designed. We completed three rounds of testing with our high-fi prototype, one in our lab and two in hospitals. A total of fourteen family members tested the prototype by completing tasks while thinking aloud. We stopped using card sorts in the interest of lessening the time-commitment for families in hospitals as we had exhausted the usefulness of the technique. To test the prototype, we used a Wizard of Oz system that allowed us to remotely control the app while participants completed tasks. We also used our hospital access to get the perspective of six hospital workers through speed dating sessions with the actual prototype.
Team
We are an interdisciplinary team of engineers, designers and researchers.

We are passionate about designing beautiful human experiences.