Developing A Guideline for Hospital Tracking and Monitoring Systems Evaluation

Enhancing patients' quality of care initiatives have been gaining increasing importance in the agendas of healthcare policy makers. This paper aims to provide a guideline to support decisions maker in evaluating indoor locating technologies, tracking and monitoring systems in healthcare sector. The paper provides an overview of indoors locating and real-time tracking technologies, discusses location-based services (LBS) and introduces the performance metrics of real-time location systems (RTLS). Next, the most important types of RTLS were covered, including GPS, infrared, ultrasound, and radio frequency, the last of which covers the remaining technologies: radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless local area network (WLAN/Wi-Fi), Bluetooth, ZigBee, ultra-wideband (UWB), FM radio, Near-Field communication (NFC) and Hybrids. Additionally, the paper compares various RTLS in Smart hospitals, using the performance metrics outlined, and then using these comparisons to see how fairly to evaluate and select an appropriate system, considering the hospital's various circumstances.