These Recharge Rooms Are Helping Health Care Workers Cope

Photo caption: Covid-19 has strained health care workers’ capacity to bear witness to grievous suffering. Photograph: Nathan Howard / Getty Images. Article by LaVonne Roberts. Wired –  January 21. 2021.

Using voice-activation tech and nature-inspired soundscapes, these space are designed to give medical workers some respite from the Covid-19 front lines.

Mariam Zakhary, an assistant professor in Mount Sinai Hospital’s department of rehabilitation medicine, remembers what 7 pm sounded like in Manhattan last April: residents clapping and cheering for frontline health care workers as they ended their shifts. It’s 2021—the celebrations have mostly stopped, Covid-19 cases are rising, and our medical workers are experiencing mental anguish well beyond burnout.

Before the pandemic, doctors died by suicide at double the rate of the US population. Covid-19 has strained health care workers’ capacity to bear witness to grievous suffering. A team of artists, technologists, neuroscientists, and medical researchers came together and created recharge rooms to tackle this problem. […]

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