This project started when I visited my 97 year old great grandmother at the hospital. She kept telling me,"The nurses hate me!" to which I would reply, "Grandma, the nurses love you! How can you say they hate you?" She was upset because whenever she would call for help it would take sometimes up to 20 minutes for a nurse to get to her. When I looked out in the hall, it was obvious that the nurses were not ignoring Grandma, they were busy with other patients. Unfortunetly she was restricted to her bed, and couldn't see out into the hall, so for all she knew, they were ignoring her.

The problem I solved lets the patient understand how busy the nurses are without invading the privacy of the nurses. Each patient room would be outfitted with a Magic Mirror, an LCD screen that is connected to the nurses' station. The station would relay to the patient how busy the nurses are by the number of raining crosses on the screen. For example if the nurse isn't very busy only one cross would be raining at a time. If the nurse was extremely busy, 10 crosses would be raining. It relates back to the old saying of "When it rains, it pours."




When the patient needs a nurse, they would call down to the nurses' station where the call would be fielded by the secretary in the same way it happens now. The one exception would be the frame of the patient's Magic Mirror would light up to notify them that their call has been placed.

Thanks to RFID technology (Radio Frequency Indentification) built into the nurses' name badges, the nurse would not have to constantly update the system of her status. The badge would signal when they are moving on to the next patient and the patient's Magic Mirror rain status would update accordingly. Because the Magic Mirror only displays how busy the nurse is, not what they are doing, privacy is secured.

Since Magic Mirror has an LCD screen hooked into the nurses' station database, the ability to pull up patient charts and diagrams becomes an added benefit to the nurse. To prevent loss of patient privacy, only a nurse with a RFID name badge on would be able to access the Magic Mirror system.

The final solution is elegant, unobtrusive, and helps to calm nervous patients so treatment can be administered peacefully.