Design of a nurse calling system with real time indoor location capabilities

The main driver of this project has been to design a prove of concept of a device that allows live voice communication between patients and medical staff and the capability to locate in real time patients in an enclosed environment. The author of this project had an initial constraint it was supplied by the project director supplied for this project a DWM1001-DEV Module Development Board which provides accurate positioning thanks to its wireless Real Time Location System. After a study of the problem, a selection of components, both hardware and software were selected. The sound system is composed of a I2S Microphone SPH0645 for real time audio capturing, an I2S Amplifier Breakout board MAX98357A and a generic 8ohms speaker. The patient interface component is a button used to trigger communication. For the development of the software the Espressif IoT Development Framework was used, it provides APIs for the user to program the ESP32. The ESP-IDF was installed on VSCode IDE. For debugging the system, we used a J-Link PRO with the Eclipse IDE. The ESP32 communicates with a python-based server using a Wi-Fi network, the communication is based on the UDP protocol. The result is a prototype that showcase that a final product based on this system is feasible, it presents great autonomy and excellent real time communication features. Further lines of work are described, and the presented system is flexible enough to integrate them