Experience-based design review of healthcare facilities using interactive virtual prototypes

With rapid technological advances taking place in the architectural, engineering and construction fields, virtual prototyping is increasingly being used during the design review process of specialized building types such as healthcare facilities. Current research in healthcare facility design strongly indicates that the physical environment greatly impacts end-users in issues of safety and overall health quality. This has led to emerging trends and design approaches such as experience-based design and evidence-based design that encourage participation and collaboration with the end-users of healthcare facilities. Interactive virtual prototyping provides opportunities for embedding experience-based design concepts that enable end-users to truly experience design alternatives and concepts during design reviews. However, studies have also highlighted that developing interactive virtual prototypes is a time-consuming and labor intensive process. This study proposes an experience-based virtual prototyping system (EVPS) that was developed, implemented and evaluated at the Hershey Children’s Hospital. The goal of the study was to simulate experience-based design concepts in virtual prototypes within the context of healthcare facilities. This goal was achieved through four objectives. First, requirements for experience-based design review were analyzed by documenting end-user activities in healthcare facilities. Second, a framework was developed to categorize end-user tasks into scenarios that could be simulated in interactive virtual prototypes of a healthcare facility. The third objective focused on developing a computer application called the Experience-Based Virtual Prototyping System (EVPS) to simulate scenarios that take place in healthcare facilities. Lastly, the developed EVPS application was implemented at the Hershey Children’s Hospital to evaluate the effectiveness of task-based scenarios for extracting end user feedback during design reviews. A virtual prototyping procedure was developed to rapidly convert digital model content into interactive experience-based virtual prototypes for design review. Strategies for development included creation of a system architecture to identify interaction media, modeling content as well as features and functionality requirements. Design information workflows were investigated to efficiently transfer model content from building information modeling tools to an interactive realtime rendering platform. Procedures to incorporate interactivity were explored to enable simulation of task-based scenarios in virtual prototypes. Finally, a database of reusable interactive model content was developed and utilized for rapid production of experience-based virtual prototypes. The experience-based virtual prototyping system was implemented and tested with nurse participants at the Hershey Children’s Hospital. Focus groups enabled the identification of end-user needs and functionality requirements for developing the EVPS. The EVPS application was developed and tailored to the needs of the end-users at the Children’s Hospital—these included transition planning, way finding and staff training before they moved into the new facility. End-users preferred the EVPS to traditional methods of design review, as they were better able to visualize the design and understand the layout of spaces. A user study was designed to compare the design feedback obtained from participants in two conditions comprising a simple walk through and a task-based scenario within the virtual prototype stimulus. The study revealed that adding task-based scenarios in interactive virtual prototypes increases the level of engagement in end users and enables them to provide detailed design feedback related to their daily healthcare activities.