医療機器の保守管理のためのWiFi位置情報検出システムの開発と評価

Abstract

For the management of medical devices in hospitals, it is important to figure out their information about the location of the devices. The purpose of this paper is to develop a software that can detect the location of the medical equipments automatically with WiFi network, then to evaluate the system in the real settings in hospital.The system with our software was assessed how long it took to detect the WiFi tags on the medical devices and how it was away from the real location. The effects of radio waves of the WiFi tags on medical devices were also examined.When the medical devices were moved intentionally, this system required approximately twenty minutes to detect new locations. The locations detected by the system were shifted 4.1±2.4 m (mean±SD) (0.7-10.3 m) from the real locations. As far as radio waves were concerned, there were no influences on the operation of medical devices.In conclusion, we developed a novel location detection system using WiFi network, and applied this system in our hospital to detect the location of medical devices. Both required time and location accuracy were almost acceptable for the management of medical devices and no negative influences on the other medical devices were observed.