Philips has been working for more than 10 years exploring people-focused innovation in its ‘Experience Lab’. Researchers began by looking at residential environments, exploring how the design of bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms can impact on the people living in a property. This work has since been extended to other settings and will now look at hospitals and other healthcare facilities, starting with stroke environments and moving on to everything from general wards to more specialist areas such as intensive care, imaging suites and children’s units.
The World Health Organization estimates that each year around 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke. Five million of those die and another five million are left permanently disabled. For those who do recover, it can be a long and difficult process, with patients typically spending between one and two weeks in hospital, followed by many months in a rehabilitation centre. Due to the changing nature of stroke patients’ mental and physical capabilities during the course of their hospital stays, they represent an ideal group for investigating how personalised adaptation of the immediate environment can aid their recovery. The research will include:
- Keeping track: During the first few days after a stroke, patients are often disoriented, confused and not aware of the time. This is not only due to the stress they are under, but also because important parts of their brain may have been affected by the stroke. This may, for example, mean they are unable to interpret words or numbers, or the positions of the hands on a clock face. Philips researchers are therefore developing an interactive orientation screen that allows information, such as the time and date, to be presented in a way individual patients can interpret. So that patients are less confused about who is dealing with them, the team is also developing a system that can automatically detect who is entering the room and display the person’s name and job function on the screen. Another possible use for this display is the provision of a highly-personalised social connectivity, where people can post electronic get well cards and via which patients can video chat with friends and family
- Preventing overload: Many stroke patients are elderly and not used to dealing with technology, and in addition they often have visual, auditory or cognitive impairments, depending on which parts of their brain the stroke has affected. Over stimulating patients in the first few days after a stroke may not be a good thing. The research team is therefore developing ways of profiling the interactivity levels in its adaptive healing rooms to progressively give patients more control as and when they are capable of dealing with it
- Sunshine and blue skies. Scientific research has shown that patients in rooms that face the sun heal faster than those in rooms that do not. However, not all patient rooms have the benefit of natural light, so Philips researchers have developed artificial sunlight technology which casts a bright, sunny white light onto the patients’ bed while at the same time visually mimicking a natural blue sky, complete with subtle changes in intensity. To take this one step further, the researchers will explore how they can provide simulated nature views for bedridden patients
- Maintaining circadian rhythm. The long hours of bright artificial lighting often encountered in hospital environments can disturb a patient’s circadian – or night and day – rhythm, causing sleep problems. By linking the artificial daylight technology with a room’s lighting and sound system, Philips will experiment with a technique designed to adjust the room conditions to both the time of day and the hospital agenda. For example, instead of being woken up abruptly for an early morning doctor’s round or before visiting hours, patients could be woken more gently in the preceding period. In the evening, suitable lighting, images and sounds could help them prepare for sleep
During the research project, the team will bring nurses and specialists into the prototype settings and the feedback they provide will be used to design the optimum healthcare environments. Speaking to BBH, Jeroen Wals, innovation manager for the Healing Environments Project at Philips, explained: “There has been a wealth of evidence collected over the last few years and decades that the environment has a positive effect on people’s health and wellbeing and that patient-friendly, comforting surroundings not only reduce anxiety levels, but also promote the healing process itself.
“The centre is being set up to provide ongoing research, testing concepts that will enhance the healing environment and have a positive effect on recovery and length of stay.
“We want to come up with a range of solutions for hospitals to implement. It may be about technologies, but we will also be looking at changes to processes that help to enhance the environment. Where we do use technologies, we aim to make them as invisible and unobtrusive as possible. They should not be a hindrance, but instead a real needs-based solution that helps patients and staff. This is all about evidence-based design.”
As well as informing the future design of Philips’ own devices and solutions, the findings of the research will also be disseminated with stakeholders and through industry conferences.
Wals said: “This will be highly relevant to the NHS as the environment can impact on clinical work and the amount of time patients spend in hospital, and this has a direct link to expenditure. There is a cost-saving aspect to the work we will be undertaking, and this will make our findings very much of interest to the health service in the UK. There is also the issue of increasing patient choice and regulatory interest in patient satisfaction levels that means this sort of evidence will become more important in the future.”