Messy science
It’s notoriously tough to run lighting experiments in the ‘real world’.
In residential healthcare, it’s even harder. After all, your subjects may not be around for more than a few months, measuring personal light exposure is difficult – Wearable monitoring for evaluating non-visual effects of light on health and well-being: a systematic review. Building and Environment, double-blind’ testing is not an option, and how to account for factors out of your control, like staff turnover or the loss of a loved one?
Simply measuring one outcome like sleep is complex – Measuring sleep quality in older adults: a comparison using subjective and objective methods.
Alongside the practical challenges, there are significant barriers to implementing findings in healthcare settings, as this study points out – A systematic review of the barriers, enablers and strategies to embedding translational research within the public hospital system focusing on nursing and allied health professions.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing and luckily a growing number of teams around the world are doing just that – Assessment of sleep patterns in dementia and general population cohorts using passive in-home monitoring technologies.
Without a concerted effort to build a systematic evaluation of what works and what does not, however imperfect that may be, how can we justify an investment in an upgrade above and beyond the legal minimum, to the lighting or anything else?
That benchmarking is doubly important when it comes to new build. We will have to live with the legacy of the decisions made today for 60 years or more. We’re designing for our future selves.
So it’s a privilege to work with Karin Henningsson and Nordanstig Municipality in Sweden with Kristoffer Andersson and Marcus Bjorkman-Berlin from Evidy, to convene an international team of scientists to do just that. Helle Wijk, Lesley Palmer, Hillevi Hemphala, Rodrigo Favero, Arne Lowden, Georgios Triantafilidos, Myriam Aries and Anders Skoldunger kicked off the project earlier this month. Read more about the project.
Over the coming months, we’ll be co-designing methodologies and exploring the potential for lighting and other facilities delivered through the new build to support sleep, staff well-being, visual comfort and community engagement. We’ll also be looking at the bigger picture for the region, leveraging longitudinal studies such as the SNAK survey to see whether this investment can help this rural population to stay in their own homes for longer – a win-win-win.
Sight lines
If you’ve ever found yourself in an emergency ward, or wanted a quiet word with your boss, you’ll know just how important visual and acoustic privacy can be.
One maternity ward in Cork replaced curtained booths with walled cubicles, increasing satisfaction with privacy from 21 to 89% – Patients’ perception of privacy and confidentiality in the emergency department of a busy obstetric unit.
Research suggests a similar effect in offices, with people less likely to interact with others or feel able to focus when they feel exposed or the space is hard to ‘read’, as this recent paper from Chalmers comparing different activity-based workplace layouts explains – Relationship between the design characteristics of activity-based flexible offices and users’ perceptions of privacy and social interactions.
Glass partitions are often seen as the ‘silver bullet’ solution, combining a degree of privacy with access to daylight. But these transparent walls and doors can be a hazard for people with low vision, while the reflections from these large unbroken surfaces can be distracting or even distressing for some.
Join Buro Happold’s acoustic engineer, Rob Burrell and the team at the RNIB at Light25 next week to hear how they found the perfect balance between privacy and overwhelm.