A System for Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance based-on Internet-of-Things

Abstract

Studies show that the poor hand hygiene practices in public health institutions such as hospitals, clinics, schools and nursing homes is the most likely cause of the spread of various bacterial diseases. Proper hand hygiene is the single biggest defense against spread of diseases and therefore the caregiver compliance with hand hygiene is one of the most effective tools in preventing Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs) in such institutions. In this paper, we present a system prototype of interconnected hand-hygiene stations that use a combination Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies for monitoring the hand hygiene compliance rate. The cloud-connected hand hygiene stations can cooperate to detect hand hygiene events in real-time, and help measuring the hand hygiene compliance at large-scale health-care facilities where it is deployed. The presented work is an initial phase of an on-going research study on hand hygiene compliance. Further phases of the system are currently being developed. The proposed system is desired to be scalable, and easy to install so that it can overcome most of the problems of existing related systems.

Existing System

Wash Monitoring and Reminder System.

Proposed System

This paper presents an artifact of an on-going research project on enforcement and compliance of hand-hygiene through smart and connected systems in public health institutions. The system presented in this paper constitutes a set of hand-hygiene stations connected via the IoT technology which can be deployed in public institutions in order to control and monitor the adherence to proper hand-hygiene practices especially by the health personnel. The system has been designed to monitor the hand-hygiene compliance of caregivers or individuals by using a passive RFID wearable tags and hand hygiene stations consisting of wall-mounted soap dispensers and touchless faucets. The proposed handwashing stations are to be located both near the patients bed and entrance of the patients room in order to detect and register hand hygiene events. The design of the proposed hand hygiene compliance monitoring system mainly constitutes a network of smart hand washing stations each composed of multiple functional elements. Each function element is also called the nodes in this research. The nodes are the system components such as: faucets, soap dispensers, and gateway nodes which are integrated on a wireless domain through the ZigBee wireless communication protocol, and are capable of communicating and co-operating without requiring proximity. The wireless communication ability helps to avoid spatial restrictions for installation and thus reduces system cost. Each node of the system also integrates various embedded microprocessor, various sensors and actuators required for their function. In the following sections, we will first describe the design of the nodes used in construction of the hand washing stations. We will then describe the overall network architecture and the operation of the system for hand hygiene compliance.

Architecture

Block diagram of the Soap Dispenser Node

Block Diagram of the Faucet Node