Designer profile

Sibel Health Design Team — Put patients first in everything that we design.

Sibel Health was originally created to revolutionise medical monitoring with advanced, flexible wireless sensors and intuitive user interfaces for nurses and doctors. The ultimate goal thereby is to leverage design to enable parents to hold their premature babies sooner. The design ambitions of the design team grew as the company expanded into pregnancy and premature baby monitoring, home monitoring and adult critical care. This then led them to consider an expanding array of complex user needs and care environments to deliver “better health data for all”.

Sibel Health Design Team in Interview with Red Dot

Red Dot: To what extent do you think new technologies are changing design?
Sibel Health Design Team: They are enabling experiments and visualisations faster and better than ever before. They accelerate our ability to create astonishing things for our users.

What makes your work unique?
Our work is unique because every feature, colour, corner and fold is thought about in terms of how to make a physician or a nurse’s job easier. Our design thinks about how we can help patients get better sooner so they can return home.

Was your award-winning work inspired by current social issues?
We’re inspired by patient groups who they themselves do not have a voice. Premature infants are the most vulnerable patients in the world. They do not have lobbying groups. They can’t tell us whether they’re in pain or cold or wish they could be held. For some women in low-income countries, giving birth will be one of the most dangerous things they will ever do. Thus, the health of babies and mothers is our cause.

Which target group would you like to address with your award-winning work?
We have a special responsibility for mothers and babies. Medical monitoring in these populations is lagging behind – we are looking to revolutionise this field.

Please describe the concept of creativity against the background of your award-winning work.                                                                                                                                                        Why can’t medical devices be as intuitive as the consumer electronics that surround us? Why does medical monitoring have to be scary, burdensome and complex? We believe that the greatest creativity makes the complex simple – critical technologies shouldn’t require a PhD and bravery to wield effectively.

“Put patients first in everything that we design.”