Category: Health

RTLS in Healthcare

There’s a new Mr Beacon video interview with HT Snowday, VP of Innovation and Technology Development at Midmark RTLS. Midmark and HT are formerly of Versus Technology who were acquired by Midmark in Aug 2018.

Midmark RTLS uses a combination of infra-red, 433Mhhz RF, WiFi and Bluetooth to provide tracking of healthcare assets, care givers and patients. It allows medical equipment to be located quickly, key things such as IV pumps to be effectively distributed (par levelling) and the location of care staff and patients to be controlled and monitored. The Bluetooth part of Midmark RTLS is used more for wayfinding using powered, static beacons to mark locations. Systems also allow for health workflow processes including self-rooming to reduce waiting and queuing for care.

Healthcare is increasingly being provided at outpatient rather than inpatient treatment. This is leading to more clinics and treatments centres and the need for technical sophistication to efficiently process patients.

No mention was given to other crucial healthcare usecases we have come across at BeaconZone such as tracking (and temperature) of valuable medicines, tracking porters, wheelchairs and wayfinding from the hospital limits to reception areas.

Read about Beacons For Life Sciences

Using iBeacon to Assess Elderly Frailty

There’s a research paper by Thomas Tegou, Ilias Kalamaras, Markos Tsipouras, Nikolaos Giannakeas, Kostantinos Votis and Dimitrios Tzovaras of Information Technologies Institute, Greece on A Low-Cost Indoor Activity Monitoring System for Detecting Frailty in Older Adults.

The paper describes a room-level accuracy indoor localization system, based on Bluetooth RSSI, to assess the frailty in older people.

The implementation used smartphones as detectors:

The researchers identified features to classify degrees of movement between rooms:

The system was able to determine rooms to an accuracy above 93%. The results showed subjects with frailty had distinctive movement patterns that could be identified with high accuracy of 98%.

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Using Beacons in Healthcare

Russ Sharer, Vice-President of Global Marketing for Fulham, a manufacturer of energy-efficient lighting sub-systems has written an article in Health Estate Journal (pdf) on the use of iBeacons in healthcare.

Russ says it’s often difficult to find life saving equipment in hospitals and many organisations have to compensate by purchasing more equipment than they need. However, in use, equipment still gets misplaced, usually just at the critical time it is needed. He explains how the use of Bluetooth beacons and mesh can solve this problem. The article provides a great introduction to iBeacons and some issues such as the affect of frequency of transmission on battery life.

While the article mentions Bluetooth Mesh and iBeacons, these specific technologies don’t always have to be used. Gateways can be used instead of mesh to allow greater throughput of data. Also, any beacons, not just iBeacons, can be used as it’s usually the MAC address of the beacon that’s used for identification purposes. Using sensor beacons allows further scenarios, for example, monitoring the temperature of expensive medicines.

There are also many more scenarios for the use of beacons in healthcare than are mentioned in the article. Our beacons are being using to track hundreds of dementia patients. We have also been involved in a project to use beacons for navigation in large hospitals. Once there’s a network of beacons in a hospital, it’s possible to add lots of widely varying solutions.

Read About Beacons in Life Sciences

Wearable Tech for Dementia Patients

Dexigner has a new article on how Mettle and their use of beacons to monitor Dementia Patients. When the patient wanders out of sight the signal is lost and the app alerts the carer by notification and vibration.

mettle

While it’s an interesting piece of design, the companion app is very similar to the usual beacon-based ‘lost luggage’ type of app. In fact, many standard beacons are wearable.

There are also many more health applications waiting to be discovered that make use of the accelerometer, temperature sensor and the buzzer found in some beacons.

Using iBeacons To Prompt You To Do Healthy Things

We like Nag Murty’s tweet where he says…

“Think ibeacons are only for retail? How about using an ibeacon as a health coach”

The Product Hunt web site video shows how he is using beacons to prompt himself to do more healthy things.

Nag doesn’t share how he does this but it’s fairly simple to implement. You can use just about any beacon with AutomateIt on Android or Proximitask on iOS to create a notification when you pass a beacon.