Inventory Management and Tracking of Hospital Equipment.
Project Info
- Created By M. R. Tanvir H.
- Client Digital Medical’s
- Date 1/2/2016
- Category Healthcare
Project Description
My Team's and Digital Medical’s comprehensive and novel SaaS solution helped to streamline inventory management and tracking of hospital equipment.
The platform enables users to track the position of a piece of equipment live, providing a huge and sorely needed technical update for hospitals across the country.
The Challenge
The founders wanted to build a comprehensive system that would perform indoor location tracking of surgical equipment in hospitals.
A service like this has many potential pitfalls; Bluetooth signals in active spaces, operating restrictions within hospitals, an industry that’s slow to change, and large, well-funded competitors—to name a few. We wanted to bring a novel solution to market that would undercut the cost of other product offerings and perform more reliably.
DELIVERABLES
- Research Report
- Research Results
- Key Areas of Opportunity
- User Journeys
- Story Maps
- Low-Fidelity Wire-frames
- Prototype
- Usability Test Results
- High-Fidelity Wire-frames
The Process & Tech
We built a highly distributed system of Raspberry Pi receivers running a customized Linux environment. These receivers listen for Bluetooth signals from beacons attached to devices throughout hospitals and send them to a centralized system via WebSockets, which runs in AWS Elastic Container Service as Fargate instances. The system in AWS decides which beacon is in what room.
We developed an algorithm to make this determination efficiently across thousands of devices in an instant. This entire part of the system is written Go, and it pushes beacon positions to a Ruby on Rails application over a WebSocket, which records each position in a Postgres database. Users can watch the positions change live in their browsers in a floor map view, with no need to refresh the page, thanks to WebSockets’ push capabilities.
The Outcomes
We took a deep dive into a new set of technologies and set out to solve very difficult technical challenges. We developed a novel, scalable, and efficient solution, which has been successfully deployed in hospitals across the country.
