1,505 research outputs found

    Through Engineering 4.0 the Safe Operating Block for Patients and Medical Staff

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    The Paper deals with the management of the operating block in its many activities. By a new approach and with innovative machinery specific several problems were thus studied and overcome, such as the control of hospital infections, the operations of washing and sterilization of surgical instruments, the planning of interventions, the tracking of drugs and medical devices entering the operating block, the management of stocks, the bed management, the monitoring of environmental parameters for patient comfort and safety, the monitoring of machines and the interlocking of doors, etc. Furthermore, it is proposed a wide use of the analytical tools to support decision making, extended to the most modern Cyber-Physical Systems and Digital Twin, alongside Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Concluding with the new services that can be offered following the digital transformation 4.0 process of the operating block. Using the tools made available by the most advanced Engineering, an operating block was redesigned, safer for patients and medical staff and more efficient from a conduction point of view. This is done using an administration model that was first conceptualized, designed and then implemented adopting what is made available by Industry 4.0, as well as a series of Management Engineering methodologies aimed at an optimized government of complex systems. Through the data collected by appropriate sensors and translated by the software into usable information, there is an optimal use of the available resources, furthermore, the activities for which improvements can be made with the benefit of patients and structures are identified

    Medical robots with potential applications in participatory and opportunistic remote sensing: A review

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    Among numerous applications of medical robotics, this paper concentrates on the design, optimal use and maintenance of the related technologies in the context of healthcare, rehabilitation and assistive robotics, and provides a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in the foregoing field of science and technology, while extensively dealing with the possible applications of participatory and opportunistic mobile sensing in the aforementioned domains. The main motivation for the latter choice is the variety of such applications in the settings having partial contributions to functionalities such as artery, radiosurgery, neurosurgery and vascular intervention. From a broad perspective, the aforementioned applications can be realized via various strategies and devices benefiting from detachable drives, intelligent robots, human-centric sensing and computing, miniature and micro-robots. Throughout the paper tens of subjects, including sensor-fusion, kinematic, dynamic and 3D tissue models are discussed based on the existing literature on the state-of-the-art technologies. In addition, from a managerial perspective, topics such as safety monitoring, security, privacy and evolutionary optimization of the operational efficiency are reviewed

    Healthcare Access

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    Adequate healthcare access not only requires the availability of comprehensive healthcare facilities but also affordability and knowledge of the availability of these services. As an extended responsibility, healthcare providers can create mechanisms to facilitate subjective decision-making in accessing the right kind of healthcare services as well various options to support financial needs to bear healthcare-related expenses while seeking health and fulfilling the healthcare needs of the population. This volume brings together experiences and opinions from global leaders to develop affordable, sustainable, and uniformly available options to access healthcare services

    Developing Unique Engineering Solutions to Improve Patient Safety

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    Many efforts to improve healthcare safety have focused on redesigning processes of care or retraining clinicians. Far less attention has been focused on the use of new technologies to improve safety. We present the results of a unique collaboration between the VA National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) and the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Each year, the NCPS identifies safety problems across the VA that could be addressed with newly-engineered devices. Teams of Thayer students and faculty participating in a senior design course evaluate and engineer a solution for one of the problems. Exemplar projects have targeted surgical sponge retention, nosocomial infections, surgical site localization, and remote monitoring of hospitalized patients undergoing diagnostic testing and procedures. The program has served as an avenue for engineering students and health care workers to solve problems together. The success of this academic-clinical partnership could be replicated in other settings

    Hospitals as factories of medical garbage

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    Over the course of the twentieth century, as hospitals cleaned up, they came to produce more and more rubbish. Beginning in the 1970s and gaining pace in the 1980s and 1990s, single-use plastic items (syringes, blood bags, tubing) saturated everyday medical practice across the globe. This essay brings the question of plastic to bear upon the longer history of twentieth-century sanitary science. The widespread adoption of single-use disposable medical plastics consolidated a century’s worth of changes in medical hygiene. As strange as it may seem today, the initial uptake of medical plastics was not driven primarily by concerns about hygiene. Plastic began as a mid-century technology of convenience and durability. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that it morphed into a powerful symbol and instrument of medical hygiene. Today, both patients and practitioners have embraced plastic as an indispensable technology of clean medicine. The procession of single-use medical plastics through everyday medicine now comprises a constant, if disposable, infrastructure of medical hygiene. This new processional infrastructure of disposable hygiene has produced another, albeit unintended, consequence. This new regime has exponentially increased hospitals’ material out-puts. In so doing, plastic has refigured the ecologies of everyday medicine. Plastic hygiene has rendered hospitals factories of medical garbage

    The incorporation of Radio Frequency Identification Technology in health institutions and the determining aspects of adoption

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    The process of traceability by radio frequency identification system (RFID) is considered one of the biggest contributions of the last years in the health sector. This article aims to study the academic contributions that this technology has brought to the segment in question and the consequent difficulties resulting from the implementation of this technology in the ambit of hospital and outpatient facilities. To carry out this work, we proceeded to survey and literature review in order to select the research related to the topic of RFID in the context of traceability. The data obtained clearly show that the benefits of this tool are numerous, ranging from drug screening to the correct availability of patient data. Although it is imbued with all these advantages, RFID still represents a visible difficulty of insertion in the hospital environment due to economic and security problems in terms of information privacy. However, this new reality is undeniable and its implementation is increasingly present in the medical environment, being a necessity rather than a technological advance

    Design of a Novel Device for Fine Needle Aspiration

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    This report describes a novel cell collection device for Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA). FNA is a proven yet physically awkward technique to collect cells from suspect tumors located near or at the skin surface. Cell collection using a common disposable syringe and guided by an ultrasound is a complicated physical task and is prone to error. For this project we designed and tested two different devices; a compressive device and a spring-loaded syringe. The novel and single-handed device simplifies cell collection during a FNA. Based on performance and cost, our completed tests and analysis suggests the compressive device with integrated one-way valve is suitable and less awkward for use in FNA

    The view from the trenches : satisfaction with eHealth systems by a group of health professionals

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    The integration and adoption of eHealth systems within the health sector faces challenges. As health care practitioners are the end users of eHealth systems, their perceptions of these systems are critical in order to address the issues surrounding their implementation and application. This paper presents the views that a group of health care professionals hold regarding the eHealth systems that they use as part of their day to day work. These views were analysed according to the perceptions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with eHealth systems that these professionals expressed. They expressed satisfaction with the information consistency, work efficiency, access to information, quality of information, and availability of technical support associated with their systems use. They expressed dissatisfaction with a lack of communication and compatibility between systems, deficiency in terms of system functionality, a lack of system reliability, a lack of initial and ongoing training, and a need to develop workarounds in order to achieve work goals. Overall this research indicates that satisfaction with eHealth systems is a complex issue, and that the negative aspects of system satisfaction need to be addressed and the positive aspects carefully built upon.<br /

    Advances in Minimally Invasive Surgery

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    The minimally invasive approach in medicine is one of the most common areas of interest in surgery.Advances in Minimally Invasive Surgery describes the latest trends, indications, techniques, and approaches in minimally invasive surgery. It provides step-by-step instructions for both routine and diagnostic procedures via illustrations and video collection
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