Light and Media Projections in Patient Rooms: A preliminary case study

New media and lighting technology and new ways to connect and control it have the potential to improve the environment in hospitals with the goal of increasing patient satisfaction. How should such system be designed to do so and how can it be tested? In this paper it is investigated how a specific case, an interactive lighting and media system installed in a patient room, can be improved to support a greater experience of patient satisfaction. Through questionnaires given to 14 mothers who have just given birth and their husbands staying in an interactive patient room, the experience of staying in the room and the patient satisfaction have been assessed. The results from the questionnaires are hereto combined to data log on how the media system has been used, which additionally leads to a design evaluation for the interactive media system. The results imply several areas which can be improved to meet the specific needs of the patients and thereby provide higher patient satisfaction. Hereto, the main findings suggest that the control of the lighting needs to be less complicated, the different lighting settings needs to be better tailored to the actual needs, noise from the projector and light coming from the iPad needs to be reduced, and for critical situations, the medical equipment needs to be an exact copy of what the caregivers are used to.