ABSTRACT

There is no question that indoor environments are often uncomfortable or unhealthy for occupants. This is an even more critical issue in healthcare facilities, where patients may experience the stressful effects of poor thermal, luminous, and acoustic environments more acutely. With complementary expertise from engineering and psychology, the proposed research is focused on creating a human-on-the-loop, responsive indoor environmental system with the potential to offer better quality of care in hospitals. The outputs of this project will have profound societal impacts on the wellbeing of both healthy individuals and on recovering sick individuals. Research outcomes will enable real time human-built environment interaction to minimize stress and optimize performance in any built environment, and ultimately lead towards economic benefits achieved through wellness and higher productivity. Improved indoor environmental quality in hospital settings will improve patient healing, which is an important societal benefit. Similar strategies can be used for educational facilities, and office buildings. This research encourages Broadening Participation through inclusion of individuals from underrepresented groups (female and Latinx Co-PIs), female and minority students, and a minority serving lead institution from an EPSCoR state. Results will be disseminated broadly through scientific publications and seminars, and K-12 outreach, including STEM competitions, and summer programs.

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) not only impacts the physical health of patients, but also their psychological health. Yet environmental controls for heating, cooling and ventilation, noise attenuation, and lighting in hospitals are based on outdated models of how hospitals function, who occupies these settings, and what emerging technologies are available. As a result, many hospitals are just functionally adequate, often likely to be too cold or hot, too loud, or too bright. In order to capitalize on the healing potential of the hospital?s built environment, we propose a three-year collaborative effort between the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Arizona State University, and Drexel University to develop innovative biosensor technologies, deep-learning health data analytics, and user-centric control algorithms to connect these three domains in which the interdependencies of the physiological, physical, and psychological will be investigated, quantified, and addressed. The team is partnering with the Children?s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to validate the approach. Specific anticipated engineering/science contributions include: 1) innovative cyber-physical system architecture using heterogeneous biosensing and data analytics for real-time control; 2) new sensor fusion based technology for non-invasive, precise physiological measures that are surrogate stress indicators; 3) progressive development of innovative human centric deep model linking physiological biometrics to psychological measures, and connecting environmental factors to psychological measures facilitated with physiological biometrics; 4) new stress responsive real-time supervisory control strategies including optimal environmental adjustment, and 5) multi-level system evaluation via virtual, laboratory, and field testing at a hospital environment at CHOP.

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.

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