Image copyright STERIS Corporation
STERIS | 2020
Surgical Lighting System
The HarmonyAIR A-Series Surgical Lighting System is an operating room lighting system that provides meaningful, clinician-inspired advances to keep up with life in today’s Operating Room. Through thoughtful innovation, this future-ready operating room lighting system offers superior optical performance, laminar airflow operating room design, and suspension that operates for up to 5+ years without adjustment.
The Challenge:
The surgical lighting market is split between two ideologies: light as a commodity product and quality light as a differentiator. As minimally invasive surgery continues to be a prevalent paradigm shift in surgery, lighting is being used less and less during surgical procedures. STERIS was clear they wanted to be the quality light solution in the space. Quality light is surgeon, user, and use case driven and usability was of this highest priority. Our challenge was to deliver site illumination, create consistency in control and improve sterile air flow while cementing STERIS as the leader in surgical lighting.
The Outcome:
The HarmonyAIR A-Series Surgical Lighting System redefines optical performance through excellent color, contrast, clarity, and control. A unique peninsula design provides optimal illumination at the surgical site, including deep cavity procedures. Now you can automatically maintain constant light intensity even when the light is adjusted or moved during a procedure.
This ceiling-mounted surgical light allows unobstructed flow of clean air through the light head to dissipate accumulated heat and surgical smoke, and a unique airfoil design decreases air turbulence. A patent-pending continuous braking system eliminates the need for adjustment for up to 5+ years of usage.
Illuminating Discoveries
Visibility of the surgical site is the primary function for lights in the operating room. In order to direct light at a single point lights often have to be placed directly over the surgeon and team blocking the flow of air that maintains the sterile field. Typically there are two lights in an operating room and the system of arms that hold them in space only adds to the degradation of the sterile field by introducing turbulence as the air flows through their web. On top of blocking the flow of air, light controls have traditionally been placed at the center of the LED array creating a shadow at the center of the light beam. These realities were the basis of our team's exploration.
Exploring Our Vision
The STERIS and Balance teams worked iteratively between optimizing internal components, overlaying usability improvements, prototyping, testing, building a visual design language refining with stakeholders (users and business) and documenting intent for the system. To be honest, it wasn’t a small feat as the system had many dependencies. Not only the literal connection between the ceiling and the surgeon but consistency in interaction between the physical and digital controls of the suite of STERIS solutions.
Pure Clean Air
The design of the light head allows for air to travel to the patient without obstruction. This creates a flow of clean air that dissipates heat and surgical smoke from the surgical site. The unique cross section of the arms mitigate turbulence as air flows to the patient.
Image copyright STERIS Corporation
Uncompromised Light
An off-centered light control maximizes the concentration of light at the surgical site without compromising the physical manipulation of the light head and arms. The look and feel of the controls are redundant and consistent across all touchpoints of the STERIS OR products. They were created to be quickly manipulated regardless of if they are in view.
Image copyright STERIS Corporation
Focus
Soft tunable ambient light integrated into the top of the light head and mirrored throughout the OR on the lighting arms and ceiling provide enough ambient light for the extended team while maintaining focus on the patient.
Image copyright STERIS Corporation
Interface prototype developed for user testing - built in Axure.
Intuitive Control at Your Fingertips
In partnership with Steris, Balance designed the user interface for the lighting control panel as well as the accompanying design specification documentation to guide its development. Through iterative exploratory and evaluative research, the interface was optimized for two viewing modes that align with different needs of practitioners in the operating room based:
- Individuals in the sterile field that need to understand the relative intensity and status of each light from a distance of approximately 10 feet to allow them to understand how much room they have to adjust the intensity of any individual light.
- Individuals outside of the sterile field must be able to fine tune adjustments to the lighting based on the direction from the surgeon.
Additionally, all discrete configuration controls are available from the panel to allow it to work as a standalone system as well as an integration into OR management software.
Informed Design
This UI’s design was informed by a systematic analysis of historical research provided by Steris as well as a dataset of findings compiled through surgical procedure observation sessions conducted by Balance for other projects. The information architecture, interaction design and visual language were developed through a process of rapid experimentation designed to identify, among other things, the user’s language preferences, understanding of surgical lighting controls, prioritization of controls, visual preferences, and interaction constraints. The end result beautifully merges the needs of the OR staff both in and outside of the sterile field, making lighting control easy and seamless.
Images courtesy of STERIS.
