Could Tracking Hospital Staff Lead to Better Patient Care?

As part of a Smart Hospitals initiative, SATO Healthcare and Nagoya University Hospital’s Medical IT Center are using IoT technology to study patient care. “With this study, Nagoya University Hospital primarily seeks to visualize the work status of nurses and amount of time they spend with patients,” Kevin Leidheiser, public relations for Sato Holdings Corp., told MD+DI. “It seeks to clarify the amount of resources used to handle patients with certain characteristics and believes it will be able to use captured data to quantitatively evaluate work difficulty and efficacy.” Researchers are employing IoT wearable devices that capture, log, and visualize data on location of hospital staff and vital signs of patients. “There are two types of beacons―one for hospital workers and one for patients,” Leidheiser said. “The beacon for hospital workers tracks their location while the beacon device for patients tracks vitals and location. The beacons used for patients are customized MEDiTAG devices. MEDiTAG utilizes edge computing to provide analytics of vital signs within the beacon itself and transmit only the results to a BLE gateway, enabling a system where each device does not have to be paired to a unique smart device.” SATO Healthcare supplied an indoor location system for detecting worker location. “For nurses, precise location data at the bed level and time spent in each area is captured and logged to visualize the work and ensure optimal management of nurs...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Digital Health Source Type: news