The healthcare industry has recently been facing a number of technological trends, including telemedicine, health tracking wearables, and AI-augmented tools. These trends are changing what patients expect out of their doctor’s visit and changing how healthcare workers expect to work in outpatient practices. Architects and engineers need to rethink their process of designing an outpatient clinic’s physical space and building systems to be more flexible and adaptive to these changing expectations.

Responsive environment technologies (e.g., robotic furniture, smart lighting, etc.) can provide the means to improve the flexibility of spaces. Though these technologies have found some initial success in residential spaces, such innovations have yet to be applied to outpatient clinic rooms.

Initial investigations into such applications have developed virtual reality (VR) models of robotic furniture and wall transformations: how a physician office can transform into a patient room (above left), how workspaces can transform into a meeting room between physicians and their assistants (above right). Healthcare workers later interacted with these VR models in real-time. While they mostly expressed an enthusiasm for these ideas, some healthcare workers expressed concerns for how the transformations would fit into their usual workflows.

Future work should specifically identify the critical needs of outpatient clinic occupants, be they healthcare workers or patients. Those needs would then need to be mapped to appropriate responsive environment technologies. By integrating considerations for how both physical spaces and interactive technologies serve occupants, architects and engineers can create spaces that enable outpatient practices to serve their patients with a quality healthcare experience.

Technical Skills

Unity, Rhino

Publications

Lu, D., Ergan, S., Mann, D., & Lawrence, K. (2022). The Need for Responsive Environments: Bringing Flexibility to Clinic Spaces. In Construction Research Congress 2022 (pp. 812-821). https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483961.085

Lu, D. B., Ergan, S., Mann, D., & Lawrence, K. (2020). A Vision for Evaluations of Responsive Environments in Future Medical Facilities. In ISARC Proceedings of the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (Vol. 37, pp. 805-812). https://doi.org/10.22260/ISARC2020/0111