Smart hospitals are arriving, driven by the vision to enhance the patient experience, reduce operational burden, and improve hospital workflow. The University of Utah’s newly built Craig H. Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital contains patient rooms with lights, blinds, thermostat, door, and TV controlled through an app on a hospital-furnished iPad or personal device. This novel implementation supports varying control abilities through touch, voice command, sip and puff controller, or physical switches and remotes. This technology is potentially transformative for patients experiencing motor or mobility impairments, helping them regain lost freedom and control of their surroundings. Through semi-structured user study interviews, we explore how the technology employed in patient rooms affects — and can better support — patients and other stakeholders' needs. We propose design considerations to efficiently and seamlessly integrate smart technology into the hospital environment and describe how hospitals can adapt this technology to meet patients' unique physical abilities, encourage rehabilitation, and support independence. The potential outcomes of this new research area within human-centered computing foreshadow life-changing results for patients and other hospital stakeholders. Through this continuing work, we can discover how to build smart hospital rooms rather than simply hospital rooms containing smart home technology and guide future designers in integrating technology into the hospital environment — enhancing the patient and healthcare worker experience.
Publications
Hospital Employee Experiences Caring for Patients in Smart Patient Rooms
Joshua Dawson, Eden Fisher, Jason Wiese
CHI '24, Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2024
Joshua Dawson, Thomas Kauffman, Jason Wiese
CHI '23: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 23--28, 2023, Hamburg, DEU, 2023
Reenvisioning Patient Education with Smart Hospital Patient Rooms
Joshua Dawson, K. Jens Phanich, Jason Wiese
Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., vol. 7(4), 2023, pp. 1-23
HCI Research Challenges in Complex Healthcare Context
Tamanna Motahar, Kazi Sinthia Kabir, Joshua Dawson, Jason Wiese
The CHI Symposium for the Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH@CHI'23), 2023 Apr
Opportunities to Support Mechanical Ventilation Weaning
Joshua Dawson, Kazi Sinthia Kabir, Thomas Kauffman, Stephen K. Trapp, Jason Wiese
2022 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2022, p. 4
The Impact of Spinal Cord Injury on Participation in Human-Centered Research
Kazi Sinthia Kabir, Ahmad Alsaleem, Jason Wiese
Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2021, pp. 1902–1914
