Intelligent Systems for Optimized Operating Rooms

Intelligent systems can support healthcare activities in various ways. As an expensive and complex resource the operating room can benefit substantially from such systems. Of particular interest are techniques and systems that allow better utilization of operating rooms. Augmented and mixed reality systems, together with context awareness, can provide such functionality. This work describes a concept for an intelligent operating room. It focuses on an aspect rarely addressed by other intelligent healthcare systems in this sector – resource planning and scheduling of operations. Such system can gather information about the locations and the preparation states of resources and patients and provide optimized operation scheduling. The work also discusses how to address two key aspects for an intelligent healthcare system – quality-of-service (QoS) assurance and integration within existing clinical infrastructures. We use a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as architectural concept and an approach for QoS assurance called architectural translucency to address these aspects of healthcare systems. Furthermore, we present and evaluate a clinical application scenario in the operating room that verifies our approach.