The hospital gown is terrible.

For several decades now, the industry standard hospital gown has been confusing, humiliating, impractical, and dangerous. Recovery Robe, the result of a six year multi-stakeholder design process is changing all of that, creating a robe that is both faster and more effective for nurses and doctors, as well as more dignifying and safer for patients.

Note: photos of the current Recovery Robe and earlier prototypes, as well as descriptions of specific design improvements are available only upon request and under NDA protection due to the requirements of US Patent Law. The Recovery Robe team is currently pursuing patents and disclosing these elements too openly may cause our application to become ineligible as USPTO could view us as having transferred them into ”public knowledge.” If you’d like to see the gown or learn more about the nuance of the design, please contact me.

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Project Origins:

UVM Design for America studio was approached by medical student, now Dr. Lillian Chang, with a problem: hospital gowns were terrible and they were harming her patients. Together, we started Project DesignMed, which sought to recruit people both within and outside of the hospital to redesign the hospital gown.

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Early Work:

Our first round of interviews found that hospital gowns were deeply impersonal and that they made people feel sickly. Patients were literally being stripped of anything personal from their homes – their clothes to their jewelry – and this in turn was hurting their healing process. We also found that for younger patients, the hospital was scary in many ways. We found that above all, the hospital experience was defined by boredom, spending huge amounts of time waiting and wondering with nothing good to do.

Our first concept, an extremely simple design that would have allowed for immediate implementation was to create a washable marker pack that paired with current gowns in solid light colors. Patients would been encouraged to draw on their gowns and turn them in to their own pieces of art. Though incredibly simple, this design would help fill the hours of boredom and waiting with an activity that would allow people to personalize what they’re wearing. For people with kids and grandkids, the kids could make designs on their parents and grandparents gowns and then when the kids left, the adults would still have the nice drawings to remember the kids and another reason for why they wanted to get better.

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First Pivot:

While we really liked the drawing concept, we decided we needed to go deeper and conduct more interviews.We felt that the needs we found early on pointed to the presence of much deeper needs. We interviewed nurses and doctors from multiple medical centers and found out several new, more serious problems. From those interviews, we created user personas and how might we questions describing our stakeholders and the issues they face regarding current gowns.

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The key notes:

When a patient has to go to the bathroom or have their gown changed, nurses need to unplug and then replug their IV lines! This is uncomfortable, time-consuming, dependency creating, and potentially an infection risk.

Often, if a nurse wants to see anything, they need to see everything. This is degrading for patients.

The gown does not seal well in back and makes users feel exposed. One nurse told us that 50% of her patients (who are mainly teenagers) wear two gowns, which is neither safe or comfortable.

Easy removal of gowns is important to surgeons.

Ease of visibility is important.

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The Importance of Universal Design:

Making designs universally accessible is essential. In particular, one user we spoke with uses a wheel chair and told us that the hospital gown is the “bane of her existence” when she’s in the hospital, which is frequent.We learned that amongst people who use wheelchairs, it’s not uncommon for the current gowns, long and strappy as they are, to get caught in the wheels when people get up to speed and to be thrown from their chairs. This was a horrifying safety concern for us to learn about. Additionally, it made us realize the threat this poses to the many people who use wheel chairs when in the hospital.

We also realized that current gowns only work for people with two fully dexterous hands and arms available who can tie knots behind their back. Even for people who are able-bodied, this is a hard task to complete.We realized in our testing that many users give up on tying current gowns on their own and ask for help from a nurse or caregiver.

Show Not Tell

I regrouped the team at the studio and had us down-load all of our observations on hundreds of sticky notes. Then, based on our users’ needs we worked to establish design principles for a successful gown design and draft how might we questions. Running with our questions and with minimal resources, I led the design team to use literally any materials we had to start creating dozens of prototypes out of anything we could find. Industrial rolls of paper tow-els, construction paper, playdough, and old fabric let us rapidly iterate on our design. After a few weeks of work, we had completely reimagined the potential shape of the gown in a way we had never seen before with clothing.

Our novel shape created a gown that allowed nurses to see any area on a patient while still maintaining dignity and privacy in most positions. The clever shape allowed the gown to be removed without any disconnection of the IV lines, making sure that there was no infection risk in the new design. Best of all, because of how the shape was attached, it allowed the gown to create formfitting support for patients of all body types and sizes and give back the dignity they lost with the current gown. The new shape was also much safer because the form fitting nature and removal of strings made it so that people who use wheelchairs won’t be ejected from their chairs by gown snags. Finally, the way we have our gown enclosed requires no dexterity of hands and only utilizes broad arm motions toward the front of the body, making it much easier and more empowering for patients to put on.

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The Future of Recovery Robe:

Utilizing the design language of everyday clothing to make the gown as intuitive to put on as possible. Standard gowns confuse most people.

Keeping fasteners simple while also ensuring they are infection safe.

Ease of sorting/folding post-washing and other considerations to minimize hospital staff time required.

Further studying unexpected hazards & challenges with our gown in the UVM Medical Simulation Lab.

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Grants, Accolades, and Funding:‍

This project won first place Startup at Launch VT Collegiate and first place at the UVM Business Pitch Competition.

In 2020, we were the recipient of the UVM Biomedical Innovation Grant. Since then, we have hired 3 designers to continue testing and improving the gown.