Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls
  Despite years of research into patient falls in hospital rooms, falls and
related injuries remain a serious concern to patient safety. In this work, we
formulate a gradient-free constrained optimization problem to generate and
reconfigure the hospital room interior layout to minimize the risk of falls. We
define a cost function built on a hospital room fall model that takes into
account the supportive or hazardous effect of the patient's surrounding
objects, as well as simulated patient trajectories inside the room. We define a
constraint set that ensures the functionality of the generated room layouts in
addition to conforming to architectural guidelines. We solve this problem
efficiently using a variant of simulated annealing. We present results for two
real-world hospital room types and demonstrate a significant improvement of 18%
on average in patient fall risk when compared with a traditional hospital room
layout and 41% when compared with randomly generated layouts.
