All inhabitants of the United States should be required to undergo comprehensive physical/medical testing at least once every 5 years (but biennial testing, ideally) to determine their health status, especially in term of communicable diseases they may be carrying. Whether private doctors or public health workers gather this information, all such data should be incorporated into the patients’ medical history, and patients must be treated for their communicable illnesses or face restrictions on their travel and other activities that may place others at significantly greater risk. Testing more frequent than 5 years for any single, non-diagnosed medical issue should not be required under this proposal, although higher frequency testing may be performed as part of normal healthcare practices.

These biennial physical examinations would be comprehensive physical and mental health exams. They would be part of the required baseline level of care proposed in point #1. Catastrophic Single-Payer; Mandatory Routine Visits of these Policy Proposals. New immigrants and citizens returning from high-risk places abroad should be required to undergo such physical tests upon entering the country (either at the airport or within one week of arrival). Immigrants with medical records issued by foreign institutions deemed credible should not be required to be tested again upon entry into this country. They must just meet the 5 year rule.

Instead of shaking hands, the conventional methods of greeting a person in the United States (and worldwide) should consist of a simple bow or nod of the head. This would help result in a healthier society by reducing the spread of bacteria and disease from one person to another.

Nursing homes, assisted living centers, and other such places where long-term care is provided to individuals should be required, as a condition of maintaining their licenses, that individuals enrolled in such facilities perform a minimum of 2 hours of strenuous physical exercise per week (an average of just over 17 minutes a day). Exercise that qualifies as strenuous would place the individual between the minimum and maximum heart rate appropriate for his/her age for the minimum 120 minutes per week.

Each individual could be allowed to choose whatever exercises they like without restriction, however, they should be advised that it is beneficial to alter their exercise routine periodically. Elder care facilities need not be required to provide exercise equipment to their population, but they must be required to ensure that their patients are fulfilling the minimum exercise requirements. Exercise equipment is not absolutely necessary in order to meet these requirements.

Several ingenious ways could potentially be set up to financially encourage people to do more exercise. The best methods would encourage individuals not only to exercise but to perform other financial benefits for either themselves or others. For example, programs could be set up where people could invest money into their own retirement account, and for each dollar they invest, they would be able to get 90 cents back when they perform the required amount of exercise. Or maybe they could use such a system as a bank, so that when funds are needed, they could just exercise more (with the expended calories being recorded on the exercise machine and automatically sent to the ‘bank’ as proof) to withdraw money from that account. Perhaps health insurance companies could develop some sort of similar arrangement where people could get a portion of their premiums back for every unit of exercise performed. To provide a significant public benefit, people could open accounts with charity organizations, effectively loaning them interest-free money, and then perform exercise to get either a fraction or even 100% of each dollar back upon the performance of each unit of exercise. Either way, the charity comes out ahead because, at the very least, they would have benefited from the use of interest-free money. But chances are that charities would do much better because people tend to not like to exercise, so people will tend to either not deplete their account, or do so very slowly. If accounts are drawn slowly, charities could attach time restrictions that would effectively increase the returns to the charity by decreasing the amount of returns possible to the original depositors as the amount of time increases between the deposit and the removal of funds.

Many people, especially older people in nursing or retirement homes and people with illnesses or in the process of recovery in hospitals, should be given the opportunity to own, feed for a while, pet, or just play with a pet for at least a few hours a week. This would help alleviate their pain and suffering and may speed up their healing and recovery time and generally lift up their spirits.

QWERTY keyboards should be phased out and replaced by the easier to learn (and safer) Dvorak type. Dvorak keyboards should be introduced into elementary schools and gradual introductions should continue throughout the educational system at a rate not faster than that at which these elementary children progress through the system. As they filter out into the workforce, the new keyboards will begin to saturate society making the change permanent. However, everybody, regardless of age, should be encouraged to learn the Dvorak keyboards as fast as possible.

Lighting

Public bathrooms, especially inside the stalls, should be adequately lighted so that users are able to clearly see all areas of the toilet, making it easier to inspect and take measures to clean or otherwise prepare it for their use. Being able to clearly see all aspects of a well-lit toilet will clearly have beneficial sanitary consequences, reducing the risk of disease transmission. Perhaps a minimum of 250 lux of light should be the minimum standard. Public bathrooms in parks or campsites where it is not practical to install such systems (due to lack of electrical infrastructures, etc.) should probably be exempt from this requirement, however, they must design such spaces to allow for maximum natural lighting.

Sounds

Public bathrooms should have music or some kinds of sounds being played so that it could mask unwanted, uncomfortable normal bodily noises that often cause embarrassment for the users. Park and campsite bathrooms may be exempted from these suggestions due to lack of electrical infrastructures, etc.

Some suggestions would be to play informative/educational sound clips (news broadcasts, TED talks, etc.) so that the time is not not uselessly wasted on music, landscape sounds or other non-productive sounds, although these sounds would be much better than nothing. Another example: churches could have preaching or singing broadcast into the bathrooms, especially during their worship services, so users won’t miss that part of the service.

Floor Drains

Kitchens and bathrooms need to be made easier and faster to clean. Kitchens, but especially bathrooms, should be constructed with floor drains. The easiest way to make these rooms much more sanitary and far easier to clean would be to design them to be scrubbed and hosed down, much like how a car is washed. Most of the energy and effort exerted in cleaning kitchens and bathrooms should be spent scrubbing and making sure that all the nooks and crannies have been cleaned. The easiest part to cleaning these rooms should be the rinsing phase. A floor drain would allow all this rinse water to drain away. Floors need not always be sloped towards the drain because squeegees could be used to direct the excess water to the drain and, if necessary, a towel could then be passed over the floor to dry it more quickly. Mopping and sponging are cleaning methods which are not nearly as sanitary as scrubbing and then hosing down. In bathrooms, the shower drain could be used for this purpose. It would just be required that shower floors be low enough, or sloped, so that water from all other parts of the bathroom floor could drain into the shower drain. Naturally, fixtures, appliances and other items in such rooms need to be either water resistant or placed inside waterproof cabinets. However, kitchen appliances, especially stoves, should also be designed so that they too could be easily and quickly scrubbed, cleaned, and rinsed with water.

Pots and Pans Simplified Redesign

Kitchen pots and pans should be designed with as few sharp corners or inaccessible surfaces as possible so that their cleaning would be made much easier. For example, toaster oven trays should be made with gently curving corners and without metal folds that make it virtually impossible to clean under/inside them. All kitchen hardware (cookware, utensils, etc.) should be designed for easy cleaning. Easier to clean materials should also be used, but the greatest emphasis should be on the modification of their geometry so that fewer sharp curves, rivets, crevices, nooks and crannies, etc., exist where dirt and grease can collect making things extremely difficult to get perfectly clean and causing much wasted time, effort, and energy, in addition to reducing the sanitary condition of such products.

Human exercise equipments that actually consume electricity during their normal operation such as electronic stationary bicycles, stair climbers, rowing machines, treadmills, and as many other kinds of exercise machines as possible should be designed with the ability to generate their required electrical needs directly from the human energy exerted on such machines so as to make such machines energy neutral, thus not requiring any external power inputs. At least these machines should have the ability to state how much electrical energy is being produced so that users would gain a better perspective on just how much physical energy they could produce and just how much effort is required to produce 100 watts of electricity, for example.