An Autonomous Hand Hygiene Tracking Sensor System for Prevention of Hospital Associated Infections

Hospital associated infection (HAI) can lead to serious medical issues in healthcare systems, which is a major concern in the recent era. Hand hygiene is considered as an effective measure to prevent cross infections in hospital environments. Research efforts in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) can provide reliable edge-based solutions in hospitals to prevent HAI by adopting sensing, networking, and computing technologies. In this paper, we present a prototype for autonomous hand hygiene tracking combining different IoT technologies, which can be applied in healthcare environments to monitor hand hygiene activities and better prevent HAIs. The system can record hand-washing activities and provide prompt feedback if the hand-washing is not performed as required using wearable devices and smart dispensers. Collected data are transferred to a gateway via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Long Range (LoRa) wireless technologies for long-range network coverage. The hand-washing data are processed at the edge of the network (i.e., router and gateway) to provide low-latency feedback. The data can also be forwarded to a cloud server for storage, analysis, and visualization. The proposed hand hygiene tracking prototype has been tested and evaluated under different scenarios in a mock ward, demonstrating its applicability in hospital environments.