Localization of Health Center Assets Through an IoT Environment (LoCATE)

The rapid advances in modern wireless technology opens the door for new applications using the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. In the medical field, staff members of a certain hospital are in need for a system that tracks where patients/medical staff/devices are at any given time. LoCATE, which is Localization of Health Center Assets Through an IoT Environment, provides a near-real time tracking tool for medical systems using the existing 802.11 WiFi infrastructure. The primary goal of this system is to track assets and personnel at any hospital (e.g., Sentara
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RMH hospital) and continuously log a real-time location data on a cloud computing platform such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using LoCATE, administrators can view the location of doctors, patients, and assets in real-time via a web UI or a mobile app, within the organization. The collected data, stored and processes on a Cloud Storage platform, is then analyzed to expose inefficiencies in daily operations and improve the health care system. Low-level functionality of the LoCATE system is unlike that of typical Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies. The spirit of the IoT paradigm employed by LoCATE makes the system both flexible and scalable, by leveraging collaboration between embedded and cloud systems. This flexibility will allow for the future support of additional applications such as hardware integration (e.g., New hardware components). This can include data acquisition such as usage statistics and historical patient health data. Compiling this data might pave the way for future research into disease vectors or could be used to optimize care delivered for specific conditions. While implications for an IoT system such as LoCATE are wide-ranging; its primary objective is to provide an easy to use, low-cost solution to track the location of medical assets in real-time.