Real-time Medical Devices Inventory Tracking – a Hands-on Experience

The recent pandemic posed a challenge to several healthcare systems, exposing limited resources and inefficiency in managing PMDs (Portable Medical Devices). This paper reports the experience of an approach enabling hospitals to efficiently find their resources and maximize the usage of PMDs in emergency situations, such as pandemics or natural disasters, when a sudden increase in demand may be anticipated. The key novelty relies on the use of smartphones provided to hospital employees replacing typical stationary gateways spread across a hospital, functioning as mobile gateways with a front-end that assists staff in locating PMDs. As employees approach tagged PMDs, they update their locations in a real-time inventory tracker, delivering accurate data. Experiments were evaluated by contrasting two techniques (fingerprinting and multilateration) based on two different locations (an office and an apartment complex) in Zürich.