ABSTRACT
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a design team considered how to maintain the safety of workers in office environments with a product that could have useful life after the threat of the pandemic subsided. Due to high real estate costs and desire for collaboration, dense open offices will continue to be a reality. The goal was for workers to remain visibly connected while maintaining safety in existing workplace layouts. Considering the office environment holistically, the team developed a solution that respected air quality in interior environments. The solution was developed early in the pandemic, prior to a full understanding of the virus and how it spreads. The process resulted in a workstation and fan attachment system to contain viral spread and purify the air, effectively responding to the obscured risk. In this article we describe the design process and critique of early, hasty, responses which were framed by material and technical solutions and compare our ideas to worker desires through ex post facto surveys sent to workers after vaccine availability and offices began to reopen. Surveys showed a general desire for the product and indicate continued concern for workplace safety. © Common Ground Research Networks, Barbara Young, Jung Joo Sohn, Some Rights Reserved (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
ABSTRACT
Purpose/Objective(s) As an alternative to conventional compression approaches (e.g., hard plate or belt) amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have developed a touchless motion management strategy for stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT). By increasing the patient's breathing rate to induce fast shallow-breathing (FSB) with the aid of a metronome, our hypothesis was that the motion magnitude of the target would be minimized with no physical contact and compression. Materials/Methods Ten SBRT patients who were treated under FSB were selected for this study: 4 lung and 6 liver cases. Our proposed method is called shallow kinetics induced by metronome (SKIM). We have used a metronome by setting the beats-per-minute (BPM) in the range of 50–60 to induce the SB. This corresponded to a patient breathing rate of 25–30 (breathing) cycles-per-minute. Two 4DCT scans, free-breathing (FB) and SKIM, were acquired and exported to commercially available software. Subsequently, the motion magnitude of the target in a superior-to-inferior direction was measured in each data set and compared. Results The respiratory motion was greatly reduced when using SKIM. The mean ± standard deviation (SD) values of motion magnitude of the target in FB and SKIM across patients were 1.65 ± 0.93 cm and 0.76 ± 0.20 cm, respectively. Among these cases, the mean BPM setting of the metronome was 55.2. Conclusion Compared with FB, the SKIM technique could significantly reduce the respiratory motion magnitude of thoracic and abdominal targets. Our proposed method can be an excellent practical alternative to the conventional compression methods due to its flexibility and ease of implementation, especially during a global pandemic when minimal physical contact is crucial for the safety of both patients and care providers. Table 1. The comparison of motion magnitude of the target between free-breathing (FB) and shallow kinetics induced by metronome (SKIM). The mean ± standard deviation values across patients were 1.65 ± 0.93 cm and 0.76 ± 0.20 cm, respectively.