TRACKING TECHNOLOGY
Bluetooth Mesh simplifies equipment location
Russ Sharer, Vice-President of Global Marketing for Fulham, a ‘manufacturer of innovative and energy- efficient lighting sub-systems for lighting manufacturers and distributors worldwide’, explores the capabilities of Bluetooth Mesh in faster tracking and location of key equipment in hospitals, and explains how the technology can easily be embedded into its LED drivers.
If your life depended upon a hospital’s ability to locate a given piece of medical equipment and get it to your side immediately, are you comfortable that staff could do so? If you were in cardiac arrest, could they locate a defibrillator and shock your heart back into rhythm, or, if you weren’t sure of your cardiac condition, could they locate a cardiac monitor? If every breath was laboured, could they find a nebuliser, oxygen pump, and monitor? Or, more importantly, are the hospital staff confident that they could locate and deliver the required equipment to your bedside in time to save your life, or that of someone else?
It is common knowledge that most hospitals and medical centres only have confidence in their ability to provide for such situations by purchasing more equipment than they need, and then placing it in strategic locations around the facility. The assumption is that an abundance of equipment will support peak use times, although in most facilities there is no way to measure utilisation of individual hospital equipment, or the
entire inventory of such equipment. Even with a surplus of equipment, however, too often it could be in use or simply misplaced when critically needed. Starting now, however, new functionality is being added to a well- known wireless standard that can make location and retrieval of hospital equipment easy and, more importantly, fast. It can also assist in measuring the utilisation of individual pieces or groups of equipment.
Bluetooth tagging
Bluetooth is a well-established, open standard that adds wireless communications to a wide variety of devices. Bluetooth Mesh adds a mesh networking layer on top of Bluetooth, and is touted for its ability to allow all devices to share information without a single point of failure. Effective and rapid tracking of key equipment depends, however, on how well the facility can receive Bluetooth beacons, usually implemented in a Bluetooth tag – a low-energy, self- powered or long-term battery-powered
device that is placed on each piece of equipment to be tracked. The tag is similar to a serial number barcode, and can be programmed to keep all relevant information on that piece of equipment. For example, the tag could include the type of equipment, its manufacturer, date put into service, and potentially even hours of operation since last calibration.
Optimised tag design
The more sophisticated the tag, the more power it will need to operate. Manufacturers, or the provider of the Bluetooth tracking system, can optimise the design based on the needs of the facility. For some facilities, the operators may want extensive information about the equipment, but they could limit the availability of that data to only when the equipment is powered on or plugged into an electrical socket. Therefore, a cart of equipment awaiting deployment in a cupboard could only communicate the bare minimum data, which is usually the type of equipment, its location, and remaining battery life.
The equipment with its tag can sit idle for weeks or months, yet occasionally continue to broadcast its identity and location. This broadcast data, known as beacons, is collected via a Bluetooth network in the facility and transmitted to an application running either in the ‘cloud’, or in the facility’s computer centre, which maps the equipment location to a physical layout of the hospital. When an emergency or other situation arises that requires the equipment, a single call to a nurse’s station or the simple process of checking an ‘app’ on a handheld device can locate the nearest pieces of equipment that are not in use, and the caregiver can immediately retrieve that equipment.
Mapping equipment locations with handheld devices
Fulham says Bluetooth beacons integrated into lighting fixtures can be used for effective asset tracking and faster equipment location in healthcare facilities.
The tags communicate to the equipment and the Bluetooth network via beacons. The most common of those is the iBeacon, a protocol developed by Apple and
August 2018 Health Estate Journal 69
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