Hospital Management System
An IoT integrated hospital space management system that optimizes room usage
The solution used Node-Red to replicate IoT devices, an express-based based Node-Red API and a front-end built in React. The following is an explanation of the solution and how it works which is an exert from the documentation
The hospital will need to implement a tag system using RFIDs. RFID tags will be given to all doctors, nurses, cleaning staff and on patient beds which will grant room access specific to their role. All but the patient beds will have unique identifiers for security. Each operating theatre will have two accompanying RFID readers, one on the outside unit and one inside with the doors opening and closing based on the access level of the tag as well as whether the specific Doctor or nurse is meant to be attending. This, with the combination of smart locks, will decrease cleaning time for cleaning staff by reducing the misuse of the operating theatres after hours. As the range of the RFID sensor can be 1m these can be used as “vicinity” tags with automatic door openers able to open to maintain the hygiene of all personnel and decrease the cleaning time of staff (RFID4u, 2022). Multiple radar sensors on the ceiling of the room will be able to track the location of those who are in the room, but not who they are. The combination of radar, RFID and a screen outside the room will be able to display whether the room is occupied from the outside, reducing unnecessary interruptions to surgery. Operating theatres go through multiple stages: in use, needs cleaning, being cleaned and cleaned. This status and the next booking’s information will be displayed on a screen outside so that staff can make sure they are entering the correct operating theatre and signify to interlopers the theatre is off-limits. This will reduce cleaning and setup by allowing nurses and cleaners to identify which rooms need to be processed, as well as allowing those needing to find a spare room to find one quicker. Bookings will be made by administration staff who have a screen that shows the current bookings, as well as all current and future, estimated ‘cleaned room’ slots. The millimetre wave radar, smart plugs and tool camera will be used to track room utilization. The large electronic items in operating rooms such as anaesthesia machines, surgical headlines and vital signs machines that are plugged in will use smart plugs to monitor the current wattage to determine whether the instruments are in use, as well as turn-off applicable devices to prevent any misuse outside of surgeries. This will be integrated with the door system to only allow the use of electrical equipment when the correct tag is used at the door. A camera facing the utensil tray will be added to use image recognition to determine which small utensils are being used that cannot have an electronic usage sensor. This means that these items can be confirmed before surgery to make sure that the correct utensils are being used for the surgery that has been booked. The provides value by decreasing the setup time required by nurses as well as increase safety for patients, since if the wrong utensils are used it could severely injure the patient. After surgery has concluded the same utensil tray will need to be returned underneath the camera to track the presence of each utensil. This decreases the teardown for nurses as they only need to look for missing utensils and have administrators source replacement utensils quicker. It also improves safety for patients as nurses being able to immediately discover that a utensil has gone missing means that if it has been left inside a patient in can immediately be removed. The millimetre radar data will be collated into heatmaps from which the locations of humans in the room can be derived by AI. This information will then be collated into an average overall heatmap for each surgery and each cleaning session. The surgery session heatmap will be made available to the cleaning staff to help them gauge how and where a room has been most used. This should improve cleaning quality and reduce cleaning time as cleaners will be able to focus on areas with heavy usage. The cleaning staff heatmap will be provided to hospital managers to evaluate the extent of the cleaner’s sanitation of each room. This improves safety as bacteria and viruses from previous surgeries could infect current patients, causing death. An average of the average heatmaps across surgeries can be provided to hospital managers to improve the ergonomics of rooms via identifying common room usage patterns for procedures and changing the room layout as needed. Overall, the solution provides improved cleaning, improved room ergonomics, reduced interruptions, increased safety and decreased setup and teardown time