Effective medical teamwork can improve the effectiveness and experience of care for staff and patients, including safety. Healthcare organizations, and especially primary care clinics, have sought to improve medical teamwork through improved layout and design, moving staff into shared multidisciplinary team rooms. While co-locating staff has been shown to increase communication, successful designs balance four teamwork needs: face-to-face communications; situational awareness; heads-down work; perception of teamness. However, precautions for COVID-19 make it more difficult to conduct face-to-face communications. In this paper we describe a model for understanding how layout affects these four teamwork needs and describe how the perception of teamwork by staff changed after COVID-19 precautions were put in place. Observations, interviews and two standard surveys were conducted in two primary care clinics before COVID-19 and again in 2021 after a year of precautions. In general, staff felt more isolated and found it more difficult to conduct brief consults, though these perceptions varied by role. RNs, who spent more time on the phone, found it convenient to work part time-from home, while medical assistants found it more difficult to find providers in the distanced clinics. These cases suggest some important considerations for future clinic designs, including greater physical transparency that also allow for physical separation and more spaces for informal communication that are distanced from workstations.

The timing, amount, and quality of sleep are critical for an individual’s health and quality of life. This paper provides a focused narrative review of the existing literature around multidimensional environments and sleep health for aging adults. Five electronic databases, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed/Medline; EBSCOhost, PsycINFO (ProQuest), and Google Scholar yielded 54,502 total records. After removing duplicates, non-peer reviewed academic articles, and nonrelevant articles, 70 were included for review. We were able to categorize environmental factors into housing security, home environment, and neighborhood environment, and, within each environmental category, specific elements/aspects are discussed. This paper provides a comprehensive map connecting identified levels of influence (individual, home/house, and neighborhood-level) in which subfactors are listed under each level of influence/category with the related literature list. Our review highlights that multidimensional environmental factors can affect aging adults’ sleep health and eventually their physical, mental, and cognitive health and that sleep disparities exist in racial minorities in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in which cumulative environmental stressors coexist. Based on this focused narrative review on the multidimensional sleep environments for aging adults, knowledge gaps are identified, and future research directions are suggested.

Camera-based activity monitoring systems are becoming an attractive solution for smart building applications with the advances in computer vision and edge computing technologies. In this paper, we present a feasibility study and systematic analysis of a camera-based indoor localization and multi-person tracking system implemented on edge computing devices within a large indoor space. To this end, we deployed an end-to-end edge computing pipeline that utilizes multiple cameras to achieve localization, body orientation estimation and tracking of multiple individuals within a large therapeutic space spanning $1700m^2$, all while maintaining a strong focus on preserving privacy. Our pipeline consists of 39 edge computing camera systems equipped with Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) placed in the indoor space's ceiling. To ensure the privacy of individuals, a real-time multi-person pose estimation algorithm runs on the TPU of the computing camera system. This algorithm extracts poses and bounding boxes, which are utilized for indoor localization, body orientation estimation, and multi-person tracking. Our pipeline demonstrated an average localization error of 1.41 meters, a multiple-object tracking accuracy score of 88.6\%, and a mean absolute body orientation error of 29\degree. These results shows that localization and tracking of individuals in a large indoor space is feasible even with the privacy constrains.

This study examined the acute effects of electric lighting parameters (illuminance and correlated color temperature (CCT)) on vigilance and subjective alertness in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with direct relevance to architectural lighting design in senior-care and rehabilitation settings. A within-subject experimental design was used with nine older adults diagnosed with MCI. Participants completed the NASA Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) under four lighting conditions: 350 lux at 2700 K, 350 lux at 6500 K, 478 lux at 2700 K, and 478 lux at 6500 K. To account for repeated testing, practice-related changes across sessions were explicitly considered in the interpretation of outcomes. Subjective measures included the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS), the Groningen Sleep Quality Questionnaire, and two lighting evaluation surveys. Data analyses included paired-sample t-tests, effect sizes (Hedges’ g, η²), odds ratios, and confidence intervals. Across sessions, PVT performance improved overall, consistent with a practice effect. On Day 1 (350 lux), minimum reaction time did not differ between 2700 K and 6500 K; however, maximum reaction time was shorter under 6500 K, suggesting a selective reduction in extreme slow responses under cooler-spectrum light at baseline. On Day 2 (478 lux), minimum reaction time improved significantly under 6500 K, indicating faster responses under cooler-spectrum light when combined with higher illuminance and repeated exposure. False starts and lapses did not show consistent condition-dependent differences. Overall, cooler-spectrum light did not uniformly shift mean performance but instead appeared to stabilize performance by reducing extreme slow responses at baseline and enhancing rapid responses under higher illuminance with repeated exposure. These findings suggest that practice effects and spectral sensitivity jointly shape vigilance outcomes in older adults with MCI. From a building design perspective, the results support the potential value of tunable lighting (adjustable CCT and illuminance) as a non-pharmacological strategy to help sustain daytime alertness in senior-care and rehabilitation environments.