Dr. Jeffrey Rosenbluth, physical medicine and rehabilitation physician of the Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital at the University of Utah talks about a new way to give patients control in their own hospital rooms.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in 2022.
Why do you think the smart room is important?
ROSENBLUTH: Well, the smart room is important for all of the reasons that- well, let me start again. The smart room here at the Nielsen Rehabilitation Hospital restores such a huge degree of independence at a time where people feel like they’ve lost everything. There are people in those rooms that are on ventilators that can’t move a single part of their body that are now able to operate every aspect of that room and contact their loved ones and have some element of control during a time where they feel like they’ve lost everything.
And you said it wasn’t really widely accepted at the beginning. Why do you think that is?
ROSENBLUTH: I think there’s a lot of reluctance to maybe pay for a lot of these extra items in the hospital. There was a belief that to have these systems they would be very expensive, which they turned out to not be particularly expensive, and that patients perhaps wouldn’t be interested actually in using some of these equipment or they wouldn’t be here long enough to really wrap their brains around it. But that just hasn’t been how we’ve experienced this space.
What are the key factors for? What are the key parts of this smart room?
ROSENBLUTH: So the key elements of the smart room are control over lighting. So the blinds and the lighting just from the ceiling lighting, the media systems being able to stream all of the HBO now and Netflix. All of the subscription services that people have gotten used to at home, in some of our rooms now you can open and close the door, you can control the HVAC system independently and you can do this all with both touch control, you can do it with voice control, and then you can even do it with just the same breath control that we have in some of our adaptive sports equipment as well.
How many rooms do you have it in now and do you think it’s going to be the future of all hospital rooms?
ROSENBLUTH: So the really interesting thing about this hospital is that we were able to get the smart technology in all 75 beds. And that was really key to not just have the one room that has the special technology, because we really did believe that although it seemed excess, like an excessive endeavor at first, it just seems very obvious now that when you design a space for someone with a complex disability, that it has the carryover of being excellent and easy for anyone in any type of disability or not a disability, just having those automated features has been really helpful and powerful, and it makes this a space that you can customize. And it makes these experiences of being in the hospital a little bit better.
You always hear every hospital has shortages, and you just think anytime you can take a nurse away from doing something menial, like turning on a light or turning on the TV or stopping that call button as much as that she can pause it or he can possibly do that has to benefit everybody.
ROSENBLUTH: Yes. So this is a great point, and this is a side benefit that people didn’t realize as well, is there’s so many times that people are go into those rooms to do very simple tasks. Someone needs their nose scratched that can’t do that. Or like you said, someone needs the light a little brighter, a little less bright. And being able to do that for yourself really does cut down on the amount of time that people are spending in the room and allows for more quality time, I would say.
And I would say on the patient’s point of view, it’s a little bit less frustration because you hit the call button, but that nurse is dealing with someone who’s in a serious situation, not someone who needs their Netflix on the TV.
ROSENBLUTH: Yeah, absolutely. I think that some people just give up. I think some people know that the thing they’re about to ask is very simple and that they know the nurse or the aid is very busy, and so they just don’t ask. And so being able to do it now independently, it’s really interesting to see that happen.
How much does converting a room over to a smart room cost?
ROSENBLUTH: So I’m not behind all of the numbers for it, but I know one of the special things about creating these smart rooms was that we really did use a consumer technology in a commercial application. So that’s what really is different, and I think really special here is we didn’t use proprietary equipment, we used the type of equipment that you would find in your home. And so the price is probably not much higher than a traditional hospital room, to be honest.
Is there anything I’m missing?
ROSENBLUTH: Yeah. A few things. We have where we’re heading with the smart room, there’s a lot of- because the truth is that the smart room isn’t smart right now, we should say that and our next step is to make it smart. So when we talk about the smart room, we like to say that word smart room, but the rooms have a lot of technology in them, but there’s nothing that’s particularly smart about the technology. So I think some of our next steps is really diving into how some of this technology can actually start to help the patient independently of the patient or the caregiver requesting that out of the room. So for example if the room itself could actually understand that you were anxious or that you have pain, could the room possibly turn the lights down a little bit? Could it make the sound a little bit lower? Or could it even ask a nurse to come in maybe 20 minutes before the patient would think to ask the nurse for pain medications? So that’s one example. We also have a tracking system in the hospital for patients and for staff. So now what we can do is we can make the room interact with the position of the patient. So if a patient goes and leaves the room and comes back, the room could really restore itself to some type of configuration where the lighting is ideal and the sound is ideal for that person, their favorite channel is on or their artwork is in the room. That’s going to be a possibility now that we have this infrastructure. One of the elements in each room is a camera system and a speaker and microphone system. Most of the time that camera has been used for individuals with brain injuries to make sure that they’re safe and they’re being monitored by video so that they don’t leave the room or fall. But in the future, we’re going to be deploying artificial intelligence and visual learning and what we call ambient intelligence so that this room is really understanding what’s happening and can take some steps to improve the outcome for the patient. For instance, if the room is understanding that you are in there and in bed and that you’re about to get out and you’re not supposed to, the room itself can actually understand that and talk directly to the patient and ask them to maybe get back in bed. Or potentially in the future, we were talking about saving time for nurses needs. So if the room understands what’s happening through a visual system then as an aid or as a nurse comes in and does things in the room, the room knows what’s been done and perhaps can document that in the medical record system, saving the staff a lot more time as well.
END OF INTERVIEW
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