Deriving Design Requirements and Conceptual Scenarios of Temporary Negative Pressure Isolation Wards for Infectious Diseases

Abstract

Background Recently, the demand for isolation rooms has rapidly increased with the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Previous studies investigated temporary isolation wards to resolve the shortage of beds. Most of the studies, however, focused on construction methods and the capability of equipment instead of experiential aspects such as medical activities and life in quarantine. This article presents design requirements and the associated example design cases based on the identified needs of medical and facility staff from a participatory design workshop. Methods A participatory design workshop was conducted with 21 medical and facility staff in a hospital specializing in infectious diseases. Two workshop sessions including MACRO-level design for overall configurations and MICRO-level design for room layouts were conducted to participants. The collected data was analyzed to derive design requirements for temporary isolation wards. To verify the relevance and applicability of the derived design requirements, we asked four designers to develop conceptual designs of new isolation wards based on the card-type design aid, which includes the details of the requirements. Results From the design workshop, five design requirements were derived: supporting the communication between the inside and outside of an isolation ward; preventing contact with the infection source; relieving emotional anxiety; relieving medical staffs’ work burden; and securing an appropriate hospital environment. During the conceptual design process using the design aids, designers created animated conceptual scenarios for isolation wards (information system using QR codes, serving robots for delivery, trash bin discharging wastes in safety, digital window, and plugin facility module). Conclusions The design requirements can be applied for new medical service design projects, which should consider experiential aspects in addition to the physical and spatial aspects in context of temporary isolation ward design. The example scenarios would be beneficial for further exploration of a new product, system, and service design for infectious diseases while considering the experiences beyond the physical configuration. © 2021. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License org/licenses/bync/ 3.0/), which permits unrestricted educational provided the original work is properly cited. All Rights Reserved.