Neuro Consilio: Stimulating visual, haptic, olfactory and auditory senses to promote passive recovery in acute brain injury and post operative neurological patients

Abstract

The following dissertation analyses how users experience space with their different senses. And how we as designers can utilise this to improve rehabilitative designs’ responsiveness to cater to acute brain injury and post-operative neurological surgery patients.

The medical field has shown a rapid increase in neurological development that changes the way doctors have been treating patients thus far. With the rapid growth in development, the associated disciplines need to react to the change in knowledge to provide a facility that accommodates new treatment methods that will always provide the patient with the best care. When dealing with specialised fields, the architectural design process is limited by the designers’ experience and knowledge, and when it comes to the medical field, it is almost always limited. The regulations and medical planning guidelines cater to the minimum requirements and systematic applications and not set to adapt to patient needs. Thus a multidisciplinary collaborative effort is needed to address the patient’s wellbeing properly.

For the architectural profession to design responsive environments that help promote the patients’ passive recovery principles, we need to be able to identify the effect our spaces have on the brain.

The research aims to broaden the philosophical approach to design to include rehabilitation principles to create more productive environments for patients.

By studying the effect of the spaces on the brain, we know from the brain’s neuroplasticity that the constructive stimulation of the areas affected will increase its recovery rate. Once the principles have been identified, architectural drivers can be deduced from the data sets.

If correctly implemented, the responsive design principles can help produce better rehabilitative methods that don’t have to rely solely on active rehabilitation applications. The end goal is to have this facility serve as a precedent for future projects with a multidisciplinary healthcare program that aims to incorporate responsible passive neurological treatments.