Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls

Sarvenaz Chaeibakhsh; Roya Sabbagh Novin; Tucker Hermans; Andrew Merryweather; Alan Kuntz

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arXiv · 2101.03210

Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls

Sarvenaz Chaeibakhsh·Roya Sabbagh Novin·Tucker Hermans·Andrew Merryweather·Alan Kuntz

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Abstract

Despite years of research into patient falls in hospital rooms, falls and related injuries remain a serious concern to patient safety. In this work, we formulate a gradient-free constrained optimization problem to generate and reconfigure the hospital room interior layout to minimize the risk of falls. We define a cost function built on a hospital room fall model that takes into account the supportive or hazardous effect of the patient's surrounding objects, as well as simulated patient trajectories inside the room. We define a constraint set that ensures the functionality of the generated room layouts in addition to conforming to architectural guidelines. We solve this problem efficiently using a variant of simulated annealing. We present results for two real-world hospital room types and demonstrate a significant improvement of 18% on average in patient fall risk when compared with a traditional hospital room layout and 41% when compared with randomly generated layouts.

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Sarvenaz Chaeibakhsh, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Tucker Hermans, Andrew Merryweather, Alan Kuntz. 2021-01-08. Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03210

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