A UWB System Model for Patient Tracking and Monitoring for Smart Healthcare

There has been breathtaking developments in the sector of Healthcare. Formation of smart hospitals have emerged with the fine collaborations of IoT with medical sensors and devices. These devices take up the responsibility of monitoring the welfare of patients physically in a hospital. They are capable of tracking and monitoring the movement of patients, their physical activities and record various health parameters. A hospital premises witnesses a swarm of people on a daily basis and hence the tracking of a patients in and out is highly mandatory. Traditional tracking and monitoring using pen and paper or basic softwares are inaccurate most of the time. They are both monotonous and tedious and are highly sceptical. Hence the authors have put forth the architecture and component design of a wearable device based on Ultra Wide band Technology (UWB) for tracking and monitoring patients inside a hospital. The wearable device is a wrist band with UWB embedded tag which would trace the location of the patient precisely. The location could be accessed by the officials of the hospital in no time using a data analysis software. The UWB device follows the Time difference of Arrival (TDoA) method with triangulation technique for precise localization. The hardware and software architecture along with the complete component design is been explained further in the paper. The system is implemented initially in an area inside the hospital premises with dimensions of12.5 X 16. 5m (width X length) and will be later carried forward in the entire hospital premises.