Badge of Health
Mirion Technologies
Doctors have endless concerns during their average workday—tending to patients, updating records, performing tests; the list goes on. In certain lab settings, there’s also the inevitable exposure to radiation to contend with. To protect themselves in high radiation environments, health care workers wear dosimeter badges to measure the level of radiation that they’ve been exposed to. Mirion Technologies asked frog to review their badge design, production, and processing methods for ways to enhance the user experience.
Mirion asked frog to rethink its dosimeter badge design, production, and processing methods to enhance the doctor experience.
Dosimeter badges are ubiquitously invisible in their settings, the same white or off-white color of lab coats for nurses, doctors, radiologists, and transporters. Often the typeface is small and not easily recognizable. To measure and process radiation levels, radiation specialists have to take apart the badge, keep track of the component pieces, and then reassemble it. You’ve probably never noticed them, but they are fixtures in the lives of our health care professionals—and another thing that can be streamlined in an industry whose most valuable commodity is time.
Colors, Clips, and Fonts
The functional design changes were twofold. First, the badge received a sturdier clip to stay on clothing throughout the tumultuous activities of hospital work. Second, because processing badges requires them to be opened to remove the crystals inside for radiation analysis, frog devised a hinge that enables the badge to stay in one piece while the crystals taken out, greatly simplifying this process that must be done dozens, even hundreds of times.
We improved the usability in other ways too, by simplifying the type on the badge case to improve the readability, and
giving a hierarchy to the densely-packed information (user name, date, tracking numbers, and so on) that made the badges easier to visually scan.
Brighter Colors, Better Branding
The other graphic change was the addition of an inviting color palette, which serves several purposes. It furthers the branding for Global Dosimetry's parent company, Mirion, for which frog had also designed a brand language. The new badge adds color in otherwise drab clinical settings, and makes the badges much easier to locate in their environment. Also, the new design makes it possible to separate colors by departments; red for radiologists and blue for transporters, for example.
By auditing the production, processing, and use of dosimeter badges, frog was able to redesign the badge into an easier-functioning, aesthetically-pleasing, and less-costly device. The next time you see one of these brightly colored badges on your doctor or technician, you’ll know that it’s been redesigned to save time that's better spent on patient care.
