Upon reviewing the tendency of the large-scale hospital buildings constructed so far, we may well know that the architectural space of the hospital buildings has been designed for users' conveniences in terms of functional elements fulfilled, efficiency, uniform colors and lighting, which means that patients may well feel difficult to find their ways in the hospital. The result may be that the patients who are weak mentally and physically feel uneasy or tensed when they wander in the hospital, which may lead to their increased physical fatigue, higher blood pressure or other harmful effects.
Thus, patients' way-finding emerges as a new design challenge for the hospital building. The purpose of this study was to define the environmental variables and factors affecting patients' way-finding in the hospital and thereby, determine the correlations between the variables/factors and way-finding to provide for some framework of analysis useful to solutions of patients' way-finding problems, while identifying the causes for difficulty of their way-finding due to differences of perception between hospital building designer and user groups.