Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital

Bloorview Kids Rehab is Canada’s largest children’s rehabilitation teaching hospital, fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. Novita designed built-in AV systems for a flexible layout multi-use conference centre and a corporate boardroom with videoconferencing capabilities in this new, state-of-the-art building.

Systems feature touch-panel controls and combined room controls (to control AV systems, lights, and motorized blinds). All rooms were designed to accommodate the physically challenged – for example, lecterns are able to lower to a level comfortable for those in wheelchairs.

One of the challenges of this project was maximizing speech intelligibility for videoconferencing and recording in the glass-walled boardroom. Hard, parallel surfaces create “flutter echoes” (a ringing sound), which can be mitigated somewhat by technology, but not entirely eliminated.