Hercules

This project utilises iterative designs, flexible layouts and tracking sensors to find the optimum setup for a pop-up Moorfields Eye Hospital. As part of a cross-disciplinary UCL team including team members from The Bartlett School of Architecture, Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, as well from the Moorfields Eye Hospital Foundation Trust and commercial partners Zeiss, Optos and Ubisense, the Connected Environments team at CASA is looking to help design and build the optimum outpatient clinic for Moorfields Eye Hospitals. 

Glaucoma and medical retina care at Moorfields consists of several standardised tests that each patient goes through when visiting an outpatient clinic. These include procedures like the standard eye test and photographs taken of the eye to less heard of procedures like the Humphrey Field Analyser and the ORA. What is fundamental about these outpatient clinics is that each patient runs through the same procedures every visit. This means that the patients and the technician running the procedures go through very similar flows and patterns that can be optimised given the right technology and opportunities.  

This is precisely the problem that Project Hercules is attempting to solve. Using the pop-up clinic located at Brent Cross, which is easily reconfigurable and allows multiple different floor plans to be tested, the Project Hercules team aims to build a safer and more efficient clinic. Consenting patient and technician movements will be tracked using highly specialised Ubisense Ultra-Wideband sensors. Monitoring and recording people within a metre, these sensors will provide granular location data, which can be analysed on its own, aggregated to understand problematic areas or to potentially uncover what makes one layout much more efficient than another.