Research team midway through NIH grant focused on wayfinding

When Rebecca Davis talks about her team placing an eight-foot American flag on a wall, or oversized, decorative utensils near a dining facility, a casual listener might assume she's an interior designer.

The flag and huge utensils are visual cues Davis, professor of nursing and associate dean for research and scholarship, and her research team plan and place in assisted living or long-term care facilities. It’s a key piece of Davis’ research on wayfinding to see if visual cues help older residents who have some difficulty in this area effectively find routes within their facilities.

Davis is nearly two years into a five-year intervention study after securing a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2018.

Her research team includes experts in building and designing facilities for the aging population, site coordinators, project manager, data collectors and graduate students in Kirkhof College of Nursing's Doctor of Nursing Practice program.

The team is working in six facilities in West Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio, with plans to add six more. Davis said the facilities vary in age and resident population but have complexity in common: long hallways with neutral-colored walls, confusing intersections, and poor or no signage. "The culture of care is to make facilities more home-like, without signs, but homes are not 100,000-square-feet," she said.

Artwork in these facilities tends toward landscape paintings with subtle earth tones, Davis said. People with cognitive issues and aging eyes may have better results remembering routes that are marked with bright-colored, simple and meaningful artwork, she said.

Residents who are recruited for the study are tested several times per year on various routes to destinations within their facilities. Davis said there is a formula for data collection that calculates the speed of completing the route along with any errors made.

Soon the research team will integrate location tracking using sensors similar to those used in manufacturing to track pieces of equipment. Davis said sensors will be placed in common areas and as residents move within their facility, their trips will be noted within data collection.

"It will help us know if residents are gaining confidence, knowing the routes better and getting out of their rooms more often," she said.

The study will end in January 2023 and Davis expects results to be published by that summer.