Smartphone and BLE beacon-based patient referral and context aware patient flow management | |
| Author | Izhar, Muhammad Amir |
| Call Number | AIT Thesis no.RS-16-07 |
| Subject(s) | Smart phones Patients--Management |
| Note | A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Series Statement | Thesis ; no. RS-16-07 |
| Abstract | Through the last couple of decades trends from paper based processing and storage changed to a computer based information system in healthcare industry. Although intensive use of these information systems have improved performance of facilities but operational systems in healthcare facilities are still under tremendous pressure especially in developing countries and countries with large population. In healthcare facilities healthcare professionals have to communicate/interact with thousands of patients every day to facilitate them in medical checkup process. The communication either direct or indirect, ranging from patient registration, appointment with physician, laboratory results, medicine collection to a complex consultation and advice, is not only critical but also very useful but at the same time such frequent human to human interaction induces many interruptions and slows down workflow. In the last couple of decades various systems were developed to stream line the flows in hospital by the use of various available technologies for example some researchers used RFID based system, few researchers used ultrasound based positioning system whereas some other proposed mathematical models to solve this issues. The proposed systems were having different kind of constraints for example systems based upon the RFID and Ultrasound require additional hardware, tags and various kind of infrastructures for their operations. Furthermore these systems were just helping staff to get patient location information and were not able to pass any information to patients when required. The main objective of this study is to propose a framework by combing various latest technologies available. Smartphones are ideal candidates for the implementation of such system as modern smartphones now have up to eighteen different, pre-installed sensors (Audience, 2015) and adoptability and availability of smartphones is increasing rapidly. Three sub system have been developed as part of this framework, a sub system for transferring patient data from primary healthcare unit to central hospital, another sub system to interpret this data and create automatic appointment based upon the patient data sent from the primary healthcare unit and a third sub system is a mobile application. The mobile application serves two purposes, first it pulls patient appointment data from the central hospital database and shows it to patient as the workflow which patient needs to follow in order to complete the medical checkup, secondly the mobile application helps patient in identifying the location of a facility where patient need to go to in order to complete a workflow item for example location of lab. The mobile application also helps patients in navigating inside the hospital, the navigation component has been implemented with the help Bluetooth low energy beacons by using the concept of proximity detection. The main interface of mobile application presents patients with two views, one view showing a 2D floor plan which shows maps of all the facilities along with a 3D view of hospital building which highlights the story on which user is navigating. The location of selected facility is highlighted on map plus updated patients location in also shown on 2D floor plan while patient navigates inside the hospital. The application developed for data transfer and automatic patient appointment creation are both service oriented architectures while MongoBD has been used to store data whereas mobile application has been developed using HTML 5, THREE.JS and Estimote SDK. The proposed system not only efficiently transfers data from primary healthcare unit to central hospital but it also reduce significantly the interaction between staff and patients by automating the system of appointment creation. It also helps patient in identifying the desired location and aids in navigating to that location. |
| Year | 2016 |
| Corresponding Series Added Entry | Asian Institute of Technology. Thesis ; no. RS-16-07 |
| Type | Thesis |
| School | School of Engineering and Technology |
| Department | Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DICT) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Remote Sensing (RS) |
| Chairperson(s) | Tripathi, Nitin Kumar |
| Examination Committee(s) | Dailey, Mathew N.;Sarawut Ninsawat;Siriwan Suebnukarn |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | AIT Fellowship |
| Degree | Thesis (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2016 |