Anna Marshall‐Baker teaches in the Department of Interior Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she focuses on sustaining design and the reciprocal effects of environments and human development, particularly in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). With academic and practical experience in fine and commercial art, interior design, and psychology, she serves as a member of the Recommended Standards Consensus Committee for NICU Design, Interim Chair of the Sustaining Design Task Force for IDEC, Department Undergraduate Program Coordinator, Past‐President of IDEC, and a reviewer for the Journal of Interior Design.
Further use of the BDM as a tool for strategizing biophilic feature inclusion can thus increase the connections available with nature in the interior, beneficial for optimizing health and wellness.
Exiting due to wandering was a problem for caregivers in this dementia care unit. Previous attempts to control exiting by wanderers proved ineffective. We manipulated the view and light through a window using visual barriers: window blind, cloth barrier, and a combination of the two. The closed blind reduced exiting by 44%. The cloth barrier was the most effective solution, reducing exiting by 96%. The combination of the blind and cloth barrier reduced exiting 88%. These findings support those of Namazi, Rosner, and Calkins (1989).
The article reports a study documenting preterm infants' responses to visual patterns placed in their incubators in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and the effects of long-term exposure to the patterns. In the first experiment, 20 preterm infants were exposed to a visual pattern in two conditions, stationary and rotating, during two successive exposure periods. Regardless of condition, the majority of infants looked longer at the visual display during the second exposure period and experienced decreased heart rates and quiet, alert states. In a second experiment, visual patterns placed in 9 preterm infants' incubators on transfer to the intermediate side of the NICU remained in the incubator until discharge. An additional 9 infants served as controls. Infants exposed to the visual patterns experienced fewer state changes and stronger visual skills than infants in incubators without visual displays. These findings, although tentative because of the relatively small sample sizes, suggest that visual patterns may promote behavioral organization and visual skills in preterm infants.
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