CEE Webzine

SMART CITY

SMART INNOVATION

WEBZINE2025 Vol.08, No.2

- How often do you interact with your surrounding environments? Almost all the time, whether you are indoors or outdoors. The space we are occupying has a critical role in our mental and physical health. Carefully designed spaces can reduce stress, promote physical activity, lower crime rates, prevent infections, and even save lives.
- Health Design Lab, led by Prof. Lisa Lim, focuses on how the design of buildings and cities could improve the health and well-being of individuals. We are dedicated to rigorously researching the relationships between space and people to design and provide built environments that enrich people's lives. We work as a multi-disciplinary group closely interacting with healthcare professionals, psychologists, designers, as well as experts in other disciplines. We aim to create healthier communities through design. More specifically, we investigate research topics under the four main topics: creating safer communities, creating healthier indoor environments, supporting healthy aging, and enhancing mobility of the vulnerable population.

Creating Safer Communities

- One of our main interests is creating safe communities. Preventing accidents such as traffic collisions, fires, and crimes requires a deep understanding of how urban spatial elements influence risk. Our research investigates the complex, non-linear relationships between built environment features (e.g., land use, road networks, green spaces, and visibility) and different types of accidents, including fire accidents, crime accidents, or transport accidents. By applying advanced AI models and spatial analysis, we identify hidden patterns and high-risk zones that traditional methods may overlook.
- Integrating multi-source urban data with predictive modeling enables us to support evidence-based design and policy decisions that proactively reduce hazards. This approach allows city planners and decision-makers to implement targeted interventions such as strengthening safety infrastructure, redesigning public spaces, and improving environmental conditions. The ultimate goal is to create urban environments that are not only functional but also safer for all.

Creating Healthy Indoor Environments

- Indoor environments play a critical role in health, safety, and infection control. From healthcare facilities to shared public interiors, spatial configuration can either mitigate or exacerbate health risks. Our work investigates how airflow, visibility, circulation patterns, and zoning can reduce exposure to infectious diseases and support psychological comfort.
- By analyzing spatial attributes and their relationship with user behavior, we develop design strategies that improve air quality, minimize contamination risk, and enable adaptive responses in times of public health crisis. We aim to create indoor environments that are not only functional but also resilient and healing.
- One example study within this topic is investigating the mental health of healthcare professionals. Many healthcare professionals are suffering from stress and burnout due to certain stressful events, such as losing patients. In order to provide less stressful environments through the design of built environments, we have conducted studies in surgical settings at Mayo Clinic, identifying key aspects of their spaces contributing to their stress. We aim to create less stressful and healing environments for the users.

Supporting Healthy Aging through Design

- Among various users and residents, one of the main targets that we are focusing on for our investigation is “older adults.” The world is rapidly aging, however, our built environments are not ready yet. We want to contribute to preparing our built environments to be aligned with such an aging society.
- We are investigating multiple settings, including living environments and public spaces, to identify programmatic and physical design strategies for communities where people of all ages and conditions can age in place. Age-friendly cities and communities that provide affordable housing options, spatially support all persons, allow changing needs of households, and connect the residents to the broader community can support us to live well and age in place.
- One of the studies investigated the indoor living environments for older adults with our aim of preventing unnecessary fall accidents at home. By using long-term monitoring lifelog data at homes, we developed a model that predicts fall accidents of older adults at homes, identifying important features contributing to such fall accidents. Our findings are expected to provide safer and healthier home environments for older adults.

Enhancing Mobility of the Vulnerable Population through Design

- Vulnerable populations—such as older adults, individuals with disabilities, or patients—often face spatial barriers that limit their independence and participation. We focus on how the built environment can support or hinder mobility, dignity, and access to care.
- Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we evaluate spatial affordances for people with diverse physical and cognitive needs. Our goal is to inform the design of inclusive environments that remove obstacles, enhance navigation, and allow people of all abilities to move safely and confidently within their surroundings.
- One of the studies within this topic includes accessible bus stops for all people. As we all know, active transportation is an important mode of mobility and also supports our health. However, some groups of people (transportation disadvantaged groups) might have a challenging time using such active transportation, including buses. We have investigated design criteria for bus stops from the perspective of transportation disadvantaged groups to assess whether those are accessible or not. We believe such infrastructure (bus stops) should be accessible to support all people.

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