Term Project Outline - Building Automation on Healthcare Facilities

My original term project idea was to write a research paper on researching the different applications of Internet of things for building automation. After being suggested in the class last week of narrowing down the topic, the new idea would be researching the building automation applications on specifications of healthcare facilities. The reason of picking hospitals was that I am doing senior design on the north expansion of a children’s hospital and I think it would be interesting to research the applications of building automation on hospitals.

Since hospitals have environments that are hard to manage, the researching points will be focusing on keeping the hospitals healthy especially in the areas that require room pressurization for disease control. Also things like restrict areas and how to management them easier with no keys needed and alarm notifications. Healthcare facilities are not too updated with the new technologies especially with the design requirement with following the standard design code. The use of automation will be one of the few ways to make the healthcare design innovative; therefore I want to address it in my research paper.

Some directions I will be addressing in the paper will include energy management, HVAC systems, security & emergency response like fire systems, intercom systems, mass notifications, and video surveillance.  I will be listing the areas that are using/need building automation in healthcare facilities and also will be researching some care study examples to show the real life applications of building automation in the healthcare facilities.

Some useful resources I found:

http://www.computrols.com/what-we-do/our-clients/hospitals-healthcare-facilities/

https://www.deltacontrols.com/vertical-markets/healthcare

Comments:

Hi Sonny! I really like your idea for your term project idea. I agree with you that although the term of intelligent building has been used so many times but the explanation/definition of intelligent building has never been that clear out there. I am glad that you chose this topic and I can’t wait to know more about it at your presentation!

Hi Bach! I enjoyed reading your ideas and I like how ambitious you and Marino are for researching this challenging topic! I agree with you that nowadays building are going taller and taller and it would be awesome to know some alternatives like the topic you will be researching – underground intelligent buildings. Looking forward to seeing your Revit model!

Hi Dee! I like your idea of comparing the green building and intelligent building. These two types of buildings might be the ones that are mentioned the most of times and I never thought about the similarity and differences of these two types. I agree with you that this topic is a little broad plus I know a lot of people in our class are doing the comparison of intelligent building versus green building. Just out of my pure curiosity: what do you think that your research paper/project will be different than the others who are researching the same topic?