Designing a Patient Room as a Fall Protection Strategy: The Perspectives of Healthcare Design Experts

Abstract

Despite decades of research into patient falls, there is a dearth of evidence about how the design of patient rooms influences falls. Our multi-year study aims to better understand how patient room design can increase stability during ambulation, serving as a fall protection strategy for frail and/or elderly patients. The aim of this portion of the study was to ascertain the architect’s perspective on designing a room to mitigate the risk of falls, as well as to evaluate the face validity of a predictive algorithm to assess risk in room design using the input of a design advisory council (AC). The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the design process and decision-making for patient rooms; summarize the impressions of industry experts about the configurations and layout of the patient rooms tested in a preliminary augmented reality model; establish the face validity of modeled heat maps depicting risk; and report the results of a pre-meeting and post-meeting survey of expert opinions. Feedback was coded using human factors/ergonomic (HF/E) design principles, and the findings will be used to guide further development of an “optimal” prototype room for human subject testing. The results confirm the challenges that architects face as they balance competing priorities and reveal how a participatory process focusing on preventing falls can shift assumptions about design strategies, especially subtle changes (e.g., toilet orientation).

User Experience of Older People While Using Digital Health Technologies: A Systematic Review

“…The healthcare landscape has undergone a profound transformation with the advent of digital technologies. These advancements encompass a wide spectrum of innovations, including biosensors, wearables [1,2], digital healthcare applications such as health apps [3][4][5][6] and chatbots [7,8], remote clinical management tools [9][10][11][12][13], integrated machine learning algorithms aiding decision-making [14,15], and immersive experiences such as virtual reality [16][17][18][19] and augmented reality [20][21][22]. Moreover, electronic medical records [23,24] and visual analytics/dashboards [25][26][27][28] have become integral components of modern healthcare, forming a digital ecosystem that presents unprecedented opportunities to enhance patient care and monitoring [22].…”

Accumulated incidence of falls in people hospitalised with cancer and related factors

“…With regard to room design and layout, it is especially important that the bed area and the bathroom are in optimum conditions in order to better enable both assisted and unassisted ambulation. Full details about these aspects can be found in Piatkowski et al ( 2021 ).…”