Design a wearable for health workers. Assume you are the PM for a company that builds smart watches for elite athletes. The company now wants to build for health workers.

Introduction

I would design a wearable that helps health workers access relevant information and coordinate care with less effort, starting with emergency room nurses.

Our experience building smartwatches for elite athletes gives us a useful foundation in compact hardware, battery management, durability, and interfaces designed for people in motion. However, we should not assume that an athlete’s watch becomes suitable for healthcare simply by adding medical features. We need to understand the worker’s environment, identify a problem that benefits from a wearable, and establish where our existing technology genuinely helps.

My initial direction is IntelliNurse: a wearable assistant for retrieving verified patient information and contacting the responsible colleague without repeatedly returning to a workstation. It would support clinical workflows, not independently diagnose patients or recommend treatment.

I’ll use a user-first product design framework: clarify the objective, select a user segment, prioritize its problems, compare solutions, and define how we would validate the product.

Step 1

Clarifying Questions (3 minutes)

• Are we expanding our existing smartwatch platform, or can we develop a different wearable form factor?

Why it matters: Our existing hardware could reduce development effort, but a wrist-worn device may not suit every clinical setting.

Working assumption: This is an expansion of our wearable platform, with flexibility to adapt its enclosure, attachment, and software.

Impact on approach: We will reuse proven capabilities where appropriate while validating clinical suitability separately. Healthcare integrations and clinical AI expertise should not be assumed to exist merely because we make athlete wearables.

• Is the primary objective to improve health workers’ personal well-being or help them perform their work?

Why it matters: Fatigue management, personal health monitoring, communication, and patient-information access represent different product opportunities.

Working assumption: Our initial goal is to improve care-team workflow, with worker well-being as a potential secondary benefit.

Impact on approach: We will prioritize reducing unnecessary information retrieval and coordination effort rather than building another fitness or stress-tracking device.

• Which healthcare environments should we consider first?

Why it matters: An outpatient clinic, emergency department, operating theatre, and ambulance service have different workflows and deployment constraints.

Working assumption: We are exploring high-intensity hospital environments, but the choice of primary user remains open until we compare segments.

Impact on approach: We will evaluate emergency room nurses, ICU doctors, surgical teams, and paramedics rather than assuming that all health workers need the same product.

• Who purchases the product, and do we have a hospital partner?

Why it matters: The person wearing the device may not control the budget or approve deployment.

Working assumption: Hospitals purchase and manage the devices. We do not yet have a pilot partner.

Impact on approach: We need a product that nurses value, a measurable business case for hospital leadership, and an implementation plan acceptable to clinical, IT, security, and infection-prevention teams.

• What restrictions apply to wearables, patient data, and clinical decision support?

Why it matters: These constraints could change the product’s form factor, architecture, and intended use before feature development begins.

Working assumption: Local approval is required, and the first release will retrieve information and support communication rather than make clinical decisions.

Impact on approach: We will treat safety, privacy, cleanability, and permissible wear locations as design requirements—not issues to address after building a prototype.

Propose the Goal

Our goal is to help emergency care teams retrieve relevant patient information and coordinate with the right colleague more efficiently, without increasing distraction, compromising privacy, or weakening existing safety workflows.

For the company, success means establishing a repeatable healthcare business: a product hospitals renew and expand because its demonstrated benefits justify hardware, software, integration, and support costs.

The immediate outcome is better workflow. Improvements in patient outcomes are an important longer-term hypothesis, not something we should claim before validation.

Define the Scope

I would explore a comprehensive product vision but launch a narrow minimum viable product, or MVP, within one hospital network and one department.

The initial scope would include patient-information retrieval, concise workflow status, and acknowledged communication through an existing hospital system. We would support one electronic health record integration and one communication platform before attempting broader compatibility.

Autonomous diagnosis, medication recommendations, predictive deterioration alerts, employee performance scoring, and replacement of bedside monitors would remain outside the MVP.

The first release should solve one recurring workflow well: understand the relevant context, contact the responsible person, and know whether the request has been acknowledged.