IoT-Enabled Solutions for Environmental Monitoring in Hospitals

Abstract

Purpose In a hospital, to provide quality healthcare to a patient, it should be imperative in maintaining an optimal environment. Another important factor is also monitoring the temperature of cold storage equipment such as refrigerators and freezers, as these are crucial in maintaining a constant temperature for medicines, vaccines, blood banks, tissue samples, surgical equipment, etc and if any of these are affected by the change in temperature, it would also lead to a negative impact on the patient’s healthcare. For this purpose, we are going to monitor the environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity of key areas in the hospital as well as cold storage equipment and analyse the number of times an alarm has been raised if the room temperature, as well as cold storage equipment, has not been maintained within a specific range. Methods The methodology involves the installation of the devices in key areas within the healthcare facility for environmental monitoring. The gateway is used to communicate real-time data to an IoT Platform called Ubidots. API keys are used for integrating another platform called Zoho Creator into an IoT platform, which also allows for viewing the real-time environmental data in KPIs and dashboards via Analytics. Results and Discussion The data collected was displayed in reports and analysed with the help of pictorial representations such as graphs and dashboards. Zoho Analytics, another platform under Zoho, allows us to visualize the data and understand the environmental effects of temperature & humidity. Conclusion From this paper, we can see that as the temperature and humidity have been detected to be out of range for a certain time interval, alarms are activated and a telegram message is delivered to the individual in charge of maintaining the appropriate temperature, to address the critical issue as soon as possible. Hence this highlights the importance of environmental monitoring, even more so strengthening the purpose that incorporating IoT technologies in healthcare systems will not only benefit but also revolutionise the methods of addressing other issues related to healthcare in real-time.