Real Time Energy Monitoring and Location Tracking System for Medical Equipment Management in Hospital

The efficient utilization of high value and mobile/portable medical equipment is a key towards improving hospital’s operations and costs. In this study, a real time energy monitoring and location tracking system for medical equipment is developed and deployed in Thammasat University hospital in Pathumthani province. An embedded device in form of a smart plug is prototyped with a current sensor, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless interface, WiFi wireless interface, and a microcontroller to monitor the energy usage of a medical equipment and to track its location, simultaneously. The smart plug is acting as an electronics tag which can be tracked within the service area of our previously developed real time location tracking system which consists of a group of location tracking devices called anchors and a location server on a public cloud computing system. The energy usage data for each medical equipment is estimated and reported to the server. The staffs of the medical equipment department of the hospital can locate any equipment and monitor its energy usage status remotely over the internet. Energy utilization and movement records can be used for later data analysis.