CAREER: Making Smart Hospital Rooms Useful

将智能家居技术整合到医院病房中，应该会提高医院的效率，改善患者的康复和康复，并增强患者、访客和员工在空间中的体验。然而，对智能家居的研究无法实现这一愿景：它没有调查这项技术如何支持患者康复，也没有解决当多个人同时将智能空间用作工作场所和生活空间时可能出现的复杂挑战。因此，医院管理人员和设计人员需要指导这项技术可以为他们的医院提供什么价值。该项目探讨了智能医院的设计如何支持(1)患者自主和康复，以及(2)医院员工从医生到看护人员的复杂、交互的工作流程。研究团队将通过检查患者、他们的访客和医院员工目前如何使用已经配备智能家居技术的医院房间来研究这一点，并将利用这些见解来指导新软件的开发，以提高智能病房的可用性。对于患者和他们的家人来说，这个项目将带来更舒适、更容易使用和控制的房间；特别是，许多患者的身体障碍可能会放大这些技术的价值。对于医院员工来说，这将带来更好的工作环境，更好地支持他们照顾病人和完成工作任务。对于研究人员和设计人员来说，这将导致对智能家居以外的智能空间的新理解。研究团队将在以用户为中心的过程中进行广泛的定性工作，包括观察、访谈和日志数据分析，以研究这家康复医院的不同利益相关者如何与智能病房中部署的技术互动，他们如何受到该技术的影响，以及该技术如何更好地支持利益相关者的需求。这项工作还将研究身体残疾患者在适应自己变化的能力时如何与智能设备互动。该团队将使用主题分析来分析这一形成性工作，以开发由技术促进的利益相关者角色、交互类型和价值的描述性模型。基于这些模型，该团队将开发和评估新的软件，以提高病房对利益相关者的有用性，包括将自动化功能整合到医院病房的可能性，以及将技术整合到病房中以更好地促进患者康复的机会。这项工作还包括一系列研讨会和研究活动，以提供研究培训，并在人机交互、传感和人工智能以及可访问性的交叉点发展研究能力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.