ARCHITECTURAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSES BETWEEN ROBOTIC SURGERY WARDS IN DIGITAL HOSPITALS AND TRADITIONAL SURGERY WARDS IN CONVENTIONAL HOSPITALS

Recently, the integration between healthcare services and new technologies has been enhanced to be very necessary and effective inside digital Hospitals. Digital hospitals include a huge number of healthcare advanced technologies that have special digital and architectural requirement; these requirements cannot be provided in traditional hospitals. Many previous studies and guidelines addressed few numbers of digital hospital’s rooms and their architectural requirements. Hence, in this study, healthcare advanced technologies has been determined for outlining the architectural consideration of digital hospital’s rooms. Accordingly, Robotic Surgery Ward (RSW) has been compared with Traditional Surgery Ward (TSW) for: a) demonstrating the effect of an advanced technology (Robotic technology) on a digital hospital ward and b) helping designers to find out the main architectural and economic principles of designing RSWs besides TSWs. The main findings in this study are: a) outlining the main architectural characteristics of digital hospitals in general and digital hospital’s rooms in specific, b) articulating the main architectural and economic aspects for RSW and robotic surgery rooms, which is different from TSW. As an application of the comparative analyses, possible design alternatives of RSW and TSW has been also proposed and compared.