Text-Based Topic and Sentiment Analysis of Hospital Physical Environments: Insights Into Patient Well-Being and Environmental Design

This study explores how the hospital physical environment affects the hospital users experience. Through thematic analysis using LDA, and semantic network and sentiment analysis using ROST CM6, this study explores the key environmental factors that influence patient well-being and recovery. We collected a total of 5960 sentences from three databases, WOS, PubMed and Scopus, from relevant literature as text data. The LDA analysis identified nine key topics including natural and virtual environments, pain and anxiety reduction, sleep and healing, human and physical factors, healing environments and well-being, space and light in hospital rooms, noise and environmental control, music and color interventions, and therapeutic design in healthcare. The semantic network analysis revealed strong connections between "environment", "patient" and "health" factors, with co-occurrence frequencies of 111 times between environment-patient and 100 times between health-environment. The sentiment analysis showed predominantly positive emotions (77.55%) and neutral emotions (22.45%) in the literature regarding the physical environment's role in healthcare. This study provides practical recommendations for the design of hospital environments, emphasizing the need for a nuanced approach to designing hospital environments that integrates multi-sensory experiences and balances patient comfort and staff efficiency.