The Agaplesion Protestant Hospital in Holzminden tested the use of BLE technology for bed management
BLE transponders and a beacon infrastructure enable the recording of live data and the status of the preparation of hospital beds.
The Agaplesion Protestant Hospital Holzminden with 183 beds and around 500 employees is part of the Agaplesion Group, which was founded in 2002 and represents more than 100 facilities nationwide - including 25 hospital locations and 35 residential and care facilities.
The hygienic preparation of the beds takes place at different locations in the hospital. In order to make optimum use of bed resources and ensure hygiene standards, coordinating communication between the staff involved is necessary. The exchange of information on the status of bed preparation is often carried out by telephone. This process costs time and generates effort.
Objective
Based on Bluetooth Beacon technology, an indoor localization infrastructure was implemented in the newly constructed building complex of the hospital and each bed was marked with a BLE transponder. The permanently installed beacons forward the recorded bed data via the hospital WLAN to an app-based Cloud software solution. For areas without comprehensive WLAN, an on-premise solution using mesh protocols is available.
The algorithms of the Cloud solution enable the determination of position in space. A double reading or an overreach of the BLE receivers is prevented.
A smartphone app is used to digitize communication between the nursing staff and the management software used documents all process steps. The evaluation of the analysis data enables optimizations such as the reduction of the number of beds.
Questions? Get in contact with the editorial team!
Technologies
Application Fields