Lowering the Power Consumption of Healthcare Centers in Bangladesh using Low-Power Consuming Computing Devices

Abstract

Bangladesh's hospital receptions and wards use high-specification computers to do petty work such as patient information management, providing service information, billing and others. It is entirely unnecessary as the work performed by these computers can be done by any other low-power computing devices like thin clients or other small single-board computers. Based on this situation, the problem was identified, which was to evaluate the reduction of power consumption possible by using Low-power computing devices instead of traditional desktop computers in hospital receptions, pathology, and hospital wards. Other research studies also did a similar kind of work comparing power consumption between regular and single-board computers. Data were collected from several hospitals after visiting and observing the computer usage and hardware information used there. Alongside, the power consumption was also collected. The power consumed by a similar single-board computer, a Raspberry Pi-based system that can replace the hospital's computer system infrastructure, was also compared. It was found that a Raspberry Pi-based system can perform the same tasks consuming 4.2 times less energy than the current system. Finally, as future work, we can expand our study to other sectors like banks and offices where the existing system can be replaced with a Low-power Computing device-based system. Also, special software can be made for Raspberry Pi to optimize energy consumption further.