A real-time location system (RTLS) shows where each piece of equipment, and sometimes each member of staff, is inside a hospital at this moment. Hospitals use it to find a free infusion pump or wheelchair quickly, and to check that fridges and rooms stay at the right temperature. It is also called asset tracking.
It works like an indoor GPS. GPS does not work well inside a building. So the hospital fixes small receivers on ceilings and walls, often one in each room. Each piece of equipment carries a small battery-powered tag. The tag sends a short radio or infrared signal every few seconds. The receivers pick up the signal and work out which room, or even which bed, the tag is in. Staff badges can carry tags too. Software then shows everything on a floor plan.
Hospitals lose a great deal of time searching for equipment. A nurse who cannot find a pump may spend 20 minutes looking for one, or keep one hidden in her ward just in case. So many hospitals buy more pumps than they need. With RTLS, they can see how many pumps are actually in use.
Here is a typical case. In a 600-bed hospital in Ahmedabad, a nurse in the cardiac ward needs an infusion pump, a machine that feeds medicine into a vein at a set rate. She searches for one on the ward's screen. It shows three free pumps on her floor, the nearest in a storeroom 40 metres away. The screen also shows that another pump is overdue for its safety check. The system has already told the biomedical engineers, who will test it with biomedical test equipment before anyone uses it again.
The second job is environmental monitoring. Temperature sensors sit in the fridges that store vaccines, insulin and blood. Vaccines must stay between 2 °C and 8 °C. At 2 a.m., a fridge in the pharmacy reads 9.5 °C, because its door was left open. Within minutes, the system sends an alert to the pharmacist on duty, before the vaccines are spoiled. It also keeps a record of every reading, which inspectors can check. Keeping medicines cold at every stage, from the factory to the patient, is called the cold chain.
Tags help in other ways too. When a nurse presses the button on her badge, security staff can see exactly where help is needed. A tag on a newborn baby's ankle raises an alarm if the baby is carried out of the maternity ward without permission. Most tags and sensors send their readings over the hospital's own network. Some send them over mobile networks, and those connections are managed with IoT connectivity management. The same location data helps surgical instrument tracking find a tray that has left its department.