A Cloud-based Asset Tracking System for Hospitals Using Ultra-wideband Localization

Abstract

Nosocomial infections are fatal diseases caused by microorganisms in the hospital environment. It has mortality rates of up to 70% in intensive care units. The most important way to fight this infection is to pay attention to the hygiene of the assets in the hospital. Within the scope of this paper, an IoT-based real-time advanced asset tracking system has been implemented. This system consists of three main components: Hand Hygiene Surveillance System, Device Tracking System, and Infection Control System. Providing hand hygiene in hospitals is critical for the prevention of infections. The proposed Hygiene Surveillance System provides hand hygiene control in intensive care units and neonatal services, which are the areas with the highest risk of infections. Received signals from ultrawide-band (UWB) modules are processed by a designed positioning algorithm. While competitors are insufficient in many scenarios because of the 1-2 m precision positioning, the proposed system provides a solution in these scenarios with 20-25 cm precision. Antibiotic-resistant nosocomial infection is difficult to treat, contagious, and fatal. These patients are kept in quarantine. During the transportation of these patients, end-to-end hygiene control is required. By using the developed Infection Control System, these patients will be followed end-to-end in real-time. Our system consists 3 main layers. In the first layer, the distributed IoT devices in the environment collect the broadcasted UWB and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals from the mobile nodes. The strength of the received signals is sent to the second layer which is responsible for calculating the location of mobile nodes based on the received signals from different anchor nodes. The detected locations are sent to the thir layer which provide the real time tracking system for the web and mobile applications. In this layer different technologies such as JSON, Ajax, Server Sent Events, WebSockets, and RestFul technologies are used to deliver the real time location data to the users.