Path finder for medical information couriers in the IoT era

Abstract

In this study1, we target a routing problem for Medical Information Collectors (MICs) between medical facilities. It is assumed that each MIC, with a certain transporting capacity, starts at a medical facility as a base station, completes its route while visiting a set of other facilities using the shortest path and returns back to the BS. Each intermediate location has a certain level of medical information to be delivered via these MICs. As the total collected information on a route cannot be more than the MIC's capacity, it is important to decide on the amount of data packets and the order of the targeted intermediate locations (e,g., hospitals, clinics, etc.) to be visited by every MIC. We propose a novel medical transportation system for MICs in the Internet of Things (IoT) era, which makes use of medical/public transportation vehicles that navigate in a city for different purposes. Our system is able to deliver the urgent medical information efficiently in terms of the number of navigated routes and the sum of associated traveling distances in order to minimize the total cost.