EVAN 2, a professional anesthesia assessment app developed by Taipei Tech in collaboration with National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH), was awarded the 2022 iF Design Award. It is Taiwan’s first iF Design Award that sees the collaboration between a university and a hospital, and the first iF Design Award for NTUH.

Anesthesiologists must accurately assess a patient's condition in order to develop a customized program that provides the best anesthesia care to surgical patients. NTUH’s current information system provide anesthesiologists various examinations and medical records, but the system’s interface has significant room for improvements in order to increase the safety of the 40,000 patients undergoing anesthesia each year at NTUH. In addition, anesthesiologists require a mobile app in order to meet the demands of a clinical setting.

To answer this demand, Zheng Meng-cong (Director of Taipei Tech Design Psychology Lab) and Shih Po-yuan and Hsiao-liang Zheng (NTUH anesthesiologists) worked with NTUH Information Technology and Philips Taiwan Ltd. to devise an iPad-based anesthesia assessment app named EVAN (EValuation of ANesthesiologists). EVAN integrates three major areas of anesthesia—pre-anesthesia evaluation, post-anesthesia check, and PCA (patient-controlled analgesia) evaluation.

The team put the first iteration of EVAN to a user study and, based on the feedback, made the improved EVAN 2, which is the version that won the 2022 iF Design Award. In addition to improving the original functionality, EVAN 2 can also help anesthesiologists monitor patients' vital signs during surgery, thus enhancing anesthesia safety and efficiency. During the post-development period, Shih even enrolled in Taipei Tech’s design master's program and joined Zheng’s Design Psychology Lab in designing EVAN 2.

According to Shih, the number of anesthesia abnormalities such as seizure, emergency treatment, and difficulty of intubation has been reduced by nearly one-half since the launch of EVAN 2 at NTUH. The completion rate of pre-anesthesia evaluation has also increased from 96.25% to 99.85%. Shih believes the effectiveness of communication between healthcare professionals, designers and programmers is the key to the success of EVAN 2. Many anesthesiologists have commented that their work efficiency has improved.

The team has been working on EVAN 2 since 2018. Through working closely with NTUH anesthesiologists and repeated experimental adjustments, the app was finally completed last year. “I believe that this successful result will open more doors for cross-disciplinary cooperation between the fields of design and medical care in the future” said Zheng.