INSTRUMENTATION • ELECTRONICSSECTION TITLE
Dennis van Doorn describes how a resilient IoT mesh network could deliver higher quality hospital care for less money and lower the pressure on human resources
DESIGNING SMART HOSPITALS
R
ecently, a pilot project initiated by a Dutch children’s hospital enlisted an entire ward as an IoT ‘playground’ to experiment with
various types of tag, sensor and switch in a network. Te starting point is a network topology that provides high resilience and flexibility. It offers clear advantages over conventional mesh network technologies. It provides the ability to construct highly scalable, high-density networks. Excellent radio wave interference
resistance is ensured by using the 2.4GHz frequency band, in this case adopting a unique protocol that is different from wireless LAN or Bluetooth technology.
All intelligence is in the network.
Devices decide the best actions by themselves, locally choosing how to make best use of the locally available radio spectrum and energy. No central network controller is needed. Local decision- making ensures that devices always operate in an optimised way, ensuring scalability for massive IoT applications.
ADAPTIVE MULTI-HOP MESH TOPOLOGY Devices in the hospital mesh communicate data over multiple hops. Topology is optimised continuously, adapting to changes in the environment
and the network. For each device there are multiple routing options, and multiple gateways can be used in the same network. Multiple connection directions are supported: to/from the cloud and device- to-device in the network. With this type of mesh, devices automatically choose their role according to the situation. Tis means every device is a possible routing point for forwarding data. Users do not need to define the roles of the devices, as this is done autonomously. Tere are no repeaters, routers or other infrastructure devices required in this type of mesh. In this roll-out nodes include mobile tags for
www.engineerlive.com 43
Mobile app shows location of hospital assets
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