Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington D.C. implemented a treatment mall in 2002. The authors place the mall's development within the context of the Hospital's problems associated with ward-based treatment. They describe objectives in developing the mall, steps taken to prepare staff and hospitalized persons, and the mall's structure and programs. Providing treatment in a mall setting increased active treatment, expanded opportunities for trainees and staff, and improved monitoring of treatment activities.

This paper presents concepts for Shape-Shifting Surfaces (SSSs), i.e. surfaces that retain their effectiveness as physical barriers while undergoing changes in shape. These shape changes could be motions like expanding, shrinking, twisting, encircling, wiggling, swallowing or constricting that make the surface more effective at performing its function. The SSSs are a novel concept, and are composed of tiled arrays of polygonal cells, each cell consisting of specifically-designed compliant flexures attached to specifically-shaped overlapping thin plates or shells. Applications for such surfaces are anticipated at the micro-scale in cellular engineering and at the macro-scale for biomedical applications, recreational uses, national security, and environmental protection; each will be stem from the foundational concepts described in this paper.

This paper presents designs for Multistable Shape-Shifting Surfaces (MSSS) by introducing bistability into the Shape-Shifting Surface (SSS). SSSs are defined as surfaces that retain their effectiveness as a physical barrier while undergoing changes in shape. The addition of bistability to the SSS gives the surface multiple distinct positions in which it remains when shifted to, i.e. by designing bistability into a single SSS link, the SSS unit cell can change into multiple shapes, and stabilize within the resulting shape, while maintaining integrity against various forms of external assaults normal to its surface. Planar stable configurations of the unit cell include, expanded, compressed, sheared, half-compressed, and partially-compressed, resulting in the planar shapes of a large square, small square, rhombus, rectangle, and trapezoid respectively. Tiling methods were introduced which gave the ability to produce out-of-plane assemblies using planar MSSS unit cells. Applications for MSSSs include size-changing vehicle beds, expandable laptop screens, deformable walls, and volume-changing rigid-storage containers. Analysis of the MSSS was done using Pseudo-rigid-Body Models (PRBMs) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) which ensured bistable characteristics before prototypes were fabricated.

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