HEARTBEAT
SCADPRO X ADVENTHEALTH
VR DEVELOPMENT / UX RESEARCH
Integrated Heartbeat System
UNITY / FIGMA / TRELLO
2025
MISSION:
How might we envision the future of smart hospitals where technology enables consumers and team members to find each other and everything?
GOAL:
How might we redesign hospital systems with empathy and human-centered care at the core?
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
To understand the real challenges facing hospital staff and patients, our team conducted user interviews with nurses, clinical staff, and patient experience coordinators across multiple care units. We supplemented these with surveys measuring time spent locating equipment, communication gaps between team members, and daily workflow bottlenecks.
Key insights surfaced quickly: nurses lose significant portions of their shifts searching for equipment and personnel rather than delivering care. Fragmented communication tools create delays that compound across a shift. Clearer task visibility and streamlined coordination directly improve both efficiency and morale.
Pain Point: Time lost searching for tools and information is time taken away from patients.
MEET BRENDA
Brenda is a registered nurse managing multiple patients, rooms, and requests across a single shift. She juggles fragmented communication tools, hunts for equipment that should be at her fingertips, and still tries to deliver compassionate, attentive care. She is not an edge case — she is every nurse.
AdventHealth's mission is to extend the healing ministry of Christ through compassionate, whole-person care. Our redesign aimed to give nurses more time to do exactly that — connect with patients. Every design decision was evaluated against one question: does this give Brenda more time at the bedside?
THE HEARTBEAT ECOSYSTEM
CONNECT
A centralized dashboard providing full-floor visibility of staff positions, room statuses, and asset locations across the entire unit.
PORTAL
An outside patient room display showing live room status, patient vitals, and current team assignments — visible at a glance before entering.
LOOP
An in-room interface that personalizes the patient experience, displays care updates, and strengthens the connection between patient and care team.
SMART HEART
A wearable RFID badge worn by every staff member, transmitting real-time location and availability status across the hospital network — the backbone of the entire ecosystem.
VR STORYBOARDING
The VR simulation was built to answer one question: does the HeartBeat system actually work in practice? Rather than presenting the ecosystem as a static prototype, we placed stakeholders directly inside Brenda's shift — giving AdventHealth leadership a first-person experience of the system's impact.
MECHANICS
LOCOMOTION:
Players navigate the hospital through a teleportation system with directional arrow navigation rendered on the floor. Movement is structured to mirror real nurse pathfinding — guiding users through the hospital in the same sequence Brenda would actually move through her shift.
INTERACTION SYSTEM:
All interactions are driven by point-and-click raycasting via the Quest 3 controllers. Users engage with UI panels, trigger task states, and interact with environmental objects without prior VR experience — a deliberate design choice to ensure clinical stakeholders could engage immediately without a learning curve.
UI ARCHITECTURE:
The full HeartBeat ecosystem was reproduced spatially inside the simulation. A wrist-mounted HUD gave players access to the Connect navigation tool and Hub dashboard at any point during the experience. Portal screens appeared as world-space UI panels mounted outside patient room doors. Loop interfaces were rendered as in-room displays on patient room walls — exactly where the physical product would live.
USER TESTING
Testing was conducted with participants placed inside the simulation on Meta Quest 3. Sessions measured first-attempt task success rate, time on task, and overall comprehension of the Heartbeat system's navigation logic.
Before spatial feedback was implemented, first-attempt task success sat at 60%. After integrating directional floor navigation and world-space UI guidance, that rate reached 100% — a 40% improvement in overall task comprehension.
The results validated a core hypothesis: spatial feedback in an immersive environment communicates system logic more effectively than traditional UI patterns alone.
IMPACT
Spatial feedback design improved first-attempt task success from 60% to 100%, increasing overall comprehension by 40% — demonstrating that immersive environments can outperform traditional UI in communicating complex system logic.
Led a cross-disciplinary team of 18 across XR development, UI design, and clinical research tracks, applying design thinking methodology to a real healthcare systems challenge.
Recognized by AdventHealth leadership as a scalable innovation for hospital integration, validating the potential of empathetic, systems-level XR design in clinical environments.
