Engineering efficient travel throughout the new Acute Care Tower

Industrial engineering students from Dalhousie University are helping shape the future of healthcare at the QEII Halifax Infirmary — one route plan at a time.

As planning continues for the transformative new Acute Care Tower and its integration with the existing Halifax Infirmary, understanding how people, equipment and materials will move through the expanded campus is critical to ensuring a smooth transition. 

To support this work, Dalhousie students’ Alec Napier, Joey O’Keefe, Yousef Tayyoun and Omar Hammoud partnered on their senior-year capstone project with QEII Halifax Infirmary Expansion Project (HIEP) team members’ Josh LaFond and Colin Arsenault. LaFond is an industrial engineer, and Arsenault is a mechanical engineer and project manager.

Together, the team developed an innovative routing and visualization tool designed to model movement throughout the expanded HI campus. The interactive tool can generate optimized travel routes between departments and buildings while accounting for different travel speeds, accessibility requirements, elevator availability, access restrictions, and wayfinding challenges.

As the project evolved, the students quickly realized just how complex travelling within the hospital can be.

“What stood out and gave us more issues than expected was accurately modelling the access-control constraints across the hospital,” recalled O’Keefe, referring to the boundaries between public and restricted spaces that require specific permissions to enter.

Accessibility and inclusive design also became a major focus throughout development.

"It was a priority for the tool to be customizable and capable of accurately reflecting the diversity of people who will be navigating the hospital. From patients and visitors with specific accessibility requirements, to staff transporting equipment and supplies, to urgent emergency situations,” explained Tayyoun. 

One of the biggest surprises for the team came from something many people use at the Infirmary every day: elevators.

“There is so much more variation in elevator characteristics, locations, and intended purposes than we expected,” said Hammoud. “Trying to include all of that in the tool was a serious challenge.”

What made the experience especially exciting for the students from an engineering perspective was the open-ended nature of the project.

“There was a lot of room for us to apply our engineering skillset in different ways while creating a model that accurately depicts travel within this healthcare setting,” said Napier.

The students’ work will help support workflow validation, operational planning, and future decision-making as Atlantic Canada’s largest healthcare redevelopment project continues to take shape.

Photo of (L-R) Josh LaFond, QEII Halifax Infirmary Expansion Project, Alec Napier, Joey O’Keefe, Yousef Tayyoun, Omar Hammoud and Colin Arsenault.