PMD-Track: Portable Medical Devices’ Real-time Inventory and Tracking

Abstract

The recent COVID pandemic challenged healthcare systems worldwide and highlighted not only a lack of sufficient resources in some cases, but also an overall inefficiency in managing available PMDs (Portable Medical Devices). Hospitals typically provide their staff with smartphones to facilitate internal communication and access to hospital services. The key contribution of PMD-Track lies in the use of smartphones replacing expensive stationary gateways scattered across a hospital, acting as mobile gateways associated with a front-end that allows staff to quickly find PMDs. Thus, employees walking nearby tagged PMDs — as they perform daily activities — constantly help to automatically update these PMDs’ locations in a live inventory tracker allowing to retrieve up-to-date information.PMDs equipped with traditional Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags will update a backend service with the location of recently spotted tags and display information concerning their position in real-time. Different PMD types can issue alerts according to the type of their mobility (i.e., considering that portable devices can be more or less “dynamic”). Thus, it is expected that PMD-Track will enable hospitals to make efficient use of their PMDs in emergency situations, such as a pandemic or eventual natural disasters, where a sudden increase in demand can now be foreseen.