CAREER: Making Smart Hospital Rooms Useful

Integrating smart home technology into hospital patient rooms should make hospitals more efficient, improve patient recovery and rehabilitation, and enhance the experience of being in the space for patients, their visitors, and employees. Yet, research on smart homes cannot achieve this vision: it does not investigate how the technology can support patient recovery, nor does it address the complex challenges that can arise when multiple people use a smart space as a workplace and a living space at the same time.

Thus, hospital administrators and designers need guidance on what value this technology can provide in their hospital. This project explores how the design of smart hospitals can support (1) patient autonomy and recovery, and (2) the complex, interacting workflows of hospital employees from physicians to custodial staff. The team of researchers will study this by examining how patients, their visitors, and hospital employees currently use hospital rooms that are already equipped with smart home technology and will use those insights to guide the development of new software to improve the usefulness of smart patient rooms.

For patients and their families this project will result in rooms that are more comfortable and easier to use and control; in particular, many patients have physical impairments that may amplify the value of these technologies. For hospital employees, it will lead to an improved work environment that better supports them in caring for patients and completing work tasks.

For researchers and designers, this will lead to a new understanding of smart spaces beyond smart homes.

The research team will conduct extensive qualitative work including observations, interviews, and log data analysis in a user-centered process to study how the diverse set of stakeholders at this rehabilitation hospital interact with the technology that is deployed in the smart patient rooms, how they are affected by that technology, and how the technology can better support stakeholder needs. This work will also research how patients with physical impairments interact with smart devices as they adjust to their changed, and changing, abilities.

The team will analyze this formative work with thematic analysis to develop descriptive models of the stakeholder roles, types of interactions, and value facilitated by the technology. Based on these models, the team will develop and evaluate new software to improve the usefulness of the patient rooms to stakeholders, including the potential to incorporate automation functions into hospital patient rooms and opportunities for the technology integrated into the rooms to better facilitate patient rehabilitation.

The work also includes a series of workshops and research engagement activities to provide both research training and develop research capacity at the intersection of human-computer interaction, sensing and artificial intelligence, and accessibility.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.