Towards Vision-Based Smart Hospitals: A System for Tracking and Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance

One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff, patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such infections. We envision a smart hospital capable of increasing operational efficiency and improving patient care with less spending. In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive vision-based system for tracking people's activity in hospitals. We evaluate our method for the problem of measuring hand hygiene compliance. Empirically, our method outperforms existing solutions such as proximity-based techniques and covert in-person observational studies. We present intuitive, qualitative results that analyze human movement patterns and conduct spatial analytics which convey our method's interpretability. This work is a step towards a computer-vision based smart hospital and demonstrates promising results for reducing hospital acquired infections.Comment: Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC

Benefits of connecting rfid and lean principles in health care

The performance management process in health care is far behind compared to the manufacturing and service industries. Although nowadays the health care organizations are able to deal with a greater rank diseases, their cost, quality and delivery has essentially not improved significantly, and the difference with the other industries even seems to have increased. As opposed to this situation health care has a tremendous opportunity to deploy lean principles to reduce internal/external costs, improve patient safety, increase profits, reduce litigation and decrease the dependence on Government and Insurance. The application of these principles is being facilitated by the use of the new technologies. A new technology allowing personnel to constantly "see" what's happening with regards to patients schedule, backlog, workflow, inventory levels, resource utilization, quality, etc., is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The aim of this paper is to analyse the benefits that can be derived from the joint use of lean principles and RFID technology in health care

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

BENEFITS OF CONNECTING RFID AND LEAN PRINCIPLES IN HEALTH CARE

The performance management process in health care is far behind compared to the manufacturing and service industries. Although nowadays the health care organizations are able to deal with a greater rank diseases, their cost, quality and delivery has essentially not improved significantly, and the difference with the other industries even seems to have increased. As opposed to this situation health care has a tremendous opportunity to deploy lean principles to reduce internal/external costs, improve patient safety, increase profits, reduce litigation and decrease the dependence on Government and Insurance. The application of these principles is being facilitated by the use of the new technologies. A new technology allowing personnel to constantly "see" what’s happening with regards to patients schedule, backlog, workflow, inventory levels, resource utilization, quality, etc., is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The aim of this paper is to analyse the benefits that can be derived from the joint use of lean principles and RFID technology in health care.

Production of biodiesel from waste cooking oil using ultrasonic tubular reactor

The aim of study is to produce the synthesis of biodiesel from waste cooking oil (WCO) using ultrasonic tubular reactor at laboratory scale. The experiment was used to determine the effect of ester contents by reaction time, molar ratio of WCO to Methanol (MeOH), amount of catalyst, frequency of ultrasonic and ultrasonic output power using ultrasonic tubular reactor. Based on the optimum process by ultrasonic tubular reactor, a comparisons study of three different processes (ultrasonic tubular reactor, conventional ultrasonic cleaner and mechanical stirring) were also investigated. The optimum results of biodiesel process using ultrasonic tubular reactor are the reaction time of 5 minute, sodium hydroxide (NaOH) catalyst 1%wt of WCO, molar ratio WCO to MeOH of 1:6, frequency ultrasonic of 20 KHz and ultrasonic output power of 650 Watt. The reaction time was reduced to 12-24 times (minute) compare to mechanical stirring and the ester contents was obtained at 96.54%wt. The ternary phase diagram ultrasonic tubular reactor was to find out the liquid liquid-equilibrium base on WCO- Fatty Acid Methyl Esters (FAME) -MeOH. The results show that by increasing the residence time of the whole reactant system within the two-phase zone is good for the reaction transesterification on ultrasonic tubular reactor. The semi continuous ultrasonic tubular reactor for biodiesel process of WCO gave conversion of WCO to FAME of 98%wt with flow rate of 5.56 ml/s. Meanwhile, the pilot plan of biodiesel facilities using mechanical stirring method (capacity of 100 kg WCO/batch) was designed and the transfer knowledge about biodiesel process was a success between the university with industry in Batu Pahat

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed