Design of the physical environment is increasingly recognized as an important aid in caring for people with dementia. This article reviews the empirical research on design and dementia, including research concerning facility planning (relocation, respite and day care, special care units, group size), research on environmental attributes (noninstitutional character, sensory stimulation, lighting...

We study a class of pedestrian evacuation process in rooms without visibility by analytical and simulative methods. First, the moving distance of pedestrians for leaving the rooms is analyzed using the mean and variance theory. A microscopic pedestrian model is then extended to simulate pedestrian evacuation in the rooms. By numerical examples, the distributions of single individual’s evacuatio...

Introduction: According to WHO, patient safety is the prevention of errors and adverse effects to patients associated with health care. There is a significant impact of physical environment on health and patient safety. Identifying and eliminating built environment conditions that negatively impact patient safety during various phases of construction of healthcare facilities is a strong need of...

This paper introduces the concept of Adaptive Rooms, which are virtual environments able to dynamically adapt to users’ needs, including ‘physical’ and cognitive workflow requirements, number of users, differing cognitive abilities and skills. Adaptive rooms are collections of virtual objects, many of them self-transforming objects, housed in an architecturally active room with information spac...

BACKGROUND Airborne microorganisms within the hospital environment can potentially cause infection in susceptible patients. The objectives of this study were to identify, quantify, and determine the nosocomial potential of common airborne microorganisms present within a small animal teaching hospital. METHODS Bioaerosol sampling was done initially in all 11 rooms and, subsequently, weekly sam...

OBJECTIVE. To determine the effectiveness of an automated ultraviolet-C (UV-C) emitter against vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), Clostridium difficile, and Acinetobacter spp. in patient rooms. DESIGN. Prospective cohort study. SETTING. Two tertiary care hospitals. PARTICIPANTS. Convenience sample of 39 patient rooms from which a patient infected or colonized with 1 of the 3 targeted patho...

• a bounded space that affords partitioning into a collection of rooms; • containment within through individual rooms, where they collect people and groupware objects; • permeability of rooms allowing people and things to enter and leave them; • persistence of objects within the room over time; • socially mediated ownership that controls who should enter and use that room and how privacy is man...

Consider a rectangular art gallery divided into n rectangular rooms, such that any two rooms sharing a wall in common have a door connecting them. How many guards need to be stationed in the gallery so as to protect all of the rooms in our gallery? Notice that if a guard is stationed at a door, he will be able to guard two rooms. Our main aim in this paper is to show that Èn/2 ̆ guards are alway...

192 January 2013 H ISTORICALLY, anesthesiologists seem to be the forerunners in implementing tools and standards for safety in the medical fraternity. In the United States, since 1985, there has been a dramatic decrease in the malpractice insurance premiums of anesthesiologists. Such a decrease has not been seen in other medical or surgical specialties over this time frame. Thanks to the foresi...