Empowering nurses to deliver
faster, hands-free bedside care

Nurses at Baptist Health work in fast-paced, high-stakes environments, constantly moving between patient care, documentation, and multiple handheld devices. Juggling phones, scanners, computers, and other tools adds friction to already complex workflows, pulling attention away from patients and increasing the potential for errors.

To address these challenges, our client asked us to explore how Vuzix M400 smart glasses, HIPAA-compliant AR devices built for medical environments, could give nurses access to essential tools and information through one hands-free device. By reducing the need to carry and switch between multiple devices, the concept aimed to lighten cognitive load, streamline workflows, and help nurses stay focused on patient care.

The Vuzix M400 places a monocular display just above the dominant eye, so nurses keep their full field of view intact. Everything runs hands-free, through voice commands and a touchpad on the device body. In practice, that means pulling up records, documenting a task, capturing photos, or reaching the care team through two-way audio, all without putting down an instrument or breaking sterile protocol.

The constraints shaped the design just as much: a limited field of view meant the interface had to stay glanceable rather than screen-dependent, and sterile hands meant every interaction needed a non-touch path.

I spoke with nurses and patient care directors to understand their daily routines, from prepping patients to running the operating room. Here’s what stood out:

• Heavy time spent on documentation, scanning, and consent checks
• Constant coordination across multiple teams while keeping procedures on track
• A need for tools that help prevent errors, not add more steps
• A preference for quick, hands-free access to information over more screens to manage

I built the interface dark-mode-first, using deep green-black surfaces instead of pure black to create a calmer, less harsh experience over a long shift while maintaining high contrast and clinical clarity. Color carries meaning throughout the system: bright green marks anything active, verified, or confirmed. Blue flags location and information. Amber signals timing and urgency. Red is reserved for critical states only.

Of the two hands-free flows I designed, medication administration carried the highest stakes, so it’s the one worth walking through in detail. Here’s how a nurse moves from a patient list to a confirmed dose, hands-free the entire time.

I took the first design pass further, developing it into a more polished, high-fidelity system where every visual choice had a clear purpose. I refined the hierarchy, interaction patterns, and visual language to make the interface feel cohesive and intentional while keeping essential information quick to recognize at a glance.

I worked closely with the development team through daily syncs to make sure the build stayed aligned with the design. Together, we tested both interaction paths, voice input and tap input, to make sure they worked as intended. By the end, I had helped bring the concept from prototype to a working product ready to present at the conference.

We presented the concept prototype at Baptist Health’s health innovation conference, where it sparked conversations about what implementation could actually look like.