IoT based Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring

Compliance monitoring and surveillance is an important task in hospitals and health centers as the health-care associated infections can have serious consequences such as increasing mortality and accelerating morbidity. Monitoring and surveillance by human observers have its own difficulties such as loss of observer concentration, human error build-up, and professional deformation. In this work, we have implemented and compared the performance of two Internet of Things based approaches for monitoring the hand hygiene of medical staff during patient visiting. We used ESP modules as base stations and smart-phones as mobile nodes and estimated the distances using Bluetooth RSSI values to locate the medical staff in a patient's room. In the proximity-based solution, we compared the RSSI from a mobile node measured on different ESP nodes/modules and utilized the assumption stating that the mobile node is closest to an ESP node which yields the highest RSSI value. In the trilateration based approach, we used the RSSI values to estimate the distance of mobile nodes to each ESP node and we used a trilateration algorithm to locate the mobile node in the room. Our experiments showed that the proximity-based solution recorded 20% incorrect location visiting while the percentage for the trilateration based solution was 8%. This indicates that the trilateration based approach is more reliable than the proximity-based solution in this application domain.