A Combined Batteryless Radio and WiFi Indoor Positioning for Hospital Nursing

Abstract

This paper proposes a design of an efficient hospital nurse calling system which combines two types of indoor localization systems. The purpose of the first system is to locate patients while the second is to locate nurses equipped with their smart phones. The main goal of developing such system is to decrease the time taking for nurses to provide healthcare for patients. Patients’ positioning system is RF based. Indeed, each patient is equipped with a wireless and battery-free call button. When the switch is pressed, a wireless telegram is sent to reference nodes that act like Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The positioning of patient is performed using trilateration method with the help of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values. Hence, beacons will forward the received signal from patient’s call button to a central receiver module connected to a computer. A dedicated program has been developed to calculate the position of the call button and post it on an online database. On the other hand, the nurses’ localization system is WiFi-based. Nurses’ positioning is done by determining the Time of Arrival (ToA) and the Angle of Arrival (AoA) between the mobile phone and the WiFi router. The mobile phone locations are posted to the online database as well. Our program performs a comparison between the nurses’ and the patient’s coordinates. The nearest nurse gets an alarm. As consequence, a patient gets care from the nearest available nurse in an efficient way and with less time. The proposed system is user-friendly and Internet of Things (IoT) based architecture integrating two heterogeneous localization systems seamlessly.

Keywords