Bluetooth Mesh simplifies equipment location

If your life depended upon a hospital’s ability to locate a given piece of medical equipment and get it to your side immediately, are you comfortable that staff could do so?  If you were in cardiac arrest, could they locate a defibrillator and shock your heart back into rhythm, or, if you weren’t sure of your cardiac condition, could they locate a cardiac monitor?  If every breath was laboured, could they find a nebuliser, oxygen pump, and monitor? Or, more importantly, are the hospital staff confident that they could locate and deliver the required equipment to your bedside in time to save your life, or that of someone else?

It is common knowledge that most hospitals and medical centres only have confidence in their ability to provide for such situations by purchasing more equipment than they need, and then placing it in strategic locations around the facility. The assumption is that an abundance of equipment will support peak use times, although in most facilities there is no way to measure utilisation of individual hospital equipment, or the entire inventory of such equipment. Even with a surplus of equipment, however, too often it could be in use or simply misplaced when critically needed.

Starting now, however, new functionality is being added to a wellknown wireless standard that can make location and retrieval of hospital equipment easy and, more importantly, fast. It can also assist in measuring the utilisation of individual pieces or groups of equipment.