A User Interface Informing Medical Staff on Continuous Indoor Environmental Quality to Support Patient Care and Airborne Disease Mitigation

ABSTRACT

This project seeks to investigate the under addressed issue of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and the impacts these factors can have on human health. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought to the forefront the importance of maintaining a healthy indoor environment. Specifically, the improvement of indoor air flow has shown to reduce the risk of airborne virus exposure. This is extremely important in the context of hospitals, which contain high concentrations of at-risk individuals. Thus, the need to create a healthy indoor space is critical to improve public health and COVID-19 mitigation efforts. To create knowledge and provide insight on environmental qualities in the hospital setting, the authors have designed and built an interface to deploy in the University of Virginia Hospital Emergency Department (ED). The interface will display room-specific light, noise, temperature, CO2, humidity, VOC, and PM2.5 levels measured by the low-cost Awair Omni sensor. These insights will assist ED clinicians in mitigating disease-spread and improving patient health and satisfaction while reducing caregiver burden. The team addressed the problem through agile development involving localized sensor deployment and analysis, discovery interviews with hospital clinicians and data scientists throughout, and the implementation of a human-design centered Django interface application. Furthermore, a literature survey was conducted to ascertain appropriate thresholds for the different environmental factors. Together, this work demonstrates opportunities to assist and improve patient care with environmental data.