Nursing and Design Students Collaborate on Community Health Solutions

An ongoing collaboration between students from the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Nursing and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) took a turn in a different direction in the 2017 spring semester. After three years of working on a variety of projects focused on concussions, the students in the Design + Nursing Innovation in Healthcare program focused on a conceptual exploration of community health. 

The seven nursing students and 15 design students teamed up with researchers from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to focus on five areas of research:

• Hearing protection for firefighters.
• Rest and recovery systems for vehicle-based employees.
• Risk reduction of infectious disease on airline flights.
• Wrist support for nail gun operators.
• Promotion of safe handling of hazardous drugs.

"We had an initial meeting with NIOSH and we told them what we did and asked them if they had any projects that would fit into that,” says Steven Doehler, associate professor of industrial design in DAAP. "They sent us a list of projects and we looked at the list and picked ones that we thought would fit well with a collaborative of nurses and designers.”

Doehler says the projects they chose had a strong community health component combined with either a physical product, a digital product, a virtual product or an experiential component that the teams could collaborate on. 

On April 21, 2017, the student teams presented collaborative solutions addressing the selected topics. 

"The past few years we’ve addressed concussion, but we wanted to get out of the box and look at something else,” says Jeanine Goodin, associate professor in the College of Nursing. "We decided to take advantage of the opportunity to work with NIOSH. It fits right into what we do in our Community as Partner course in the College of Nursing. It’s occupational nursing instead of a traditional community center or site.”

The students began work on the various projects at the start of the spring semester in January.  One group working on hearing protection for firefighters redesigned the firefighter’s helmet to integrate a hearing protection device that also functioned as a radio and could be removed from the helmet and worn alone, without the helmet. Another group working on a project for wrist support for nail gun operators developed a physical model incorporating wrist and forearm support into a commonly used nailgun model.

Doehler says the finished products will be sent to NIOSH where researchers will continue with the design process in the direction that organization wants to take them.