Personnel location and monitoring system and method for enclosed facilities

a technology for personnel and enclosed facilities, applied in the field of personnel location and monitoring systems in enclosed facilities, can solve the problems of many serious new infections, 100,000 patient deaths, and many infections of patients in hospitals, and achieve the effect of limiting power usag

Inactive Publication Date: 2011-09-22
XHALE
View PDF41 Cites 144 Cited by
  • Summary
  • Abstract
  • Description
  • Claims
  • Application Information

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0034]It usually is required that each healthcare worker wash his or her hands both immediately before and immediately after touching or coming close to any particular patient. Therefore, an additional advantageous feature of the invention is to provide means in each bed monitor and each transportation monitor to hold the green light on, if it is on when first detected, for as long as the healthcare worker remains sufficiently close to the particular patient. Alternatively, or in addition, an LED on the bed monitor may illuminate to reflect the status of a healthcare worker's hand hygiene status while that healthcare worker is attending to the particular patient.
[0035]It also is advantageous to automatically turn the light off as soon as the healthcare worker moves away from that particular patient to go elsewhere, even if the time set for the light to go out (e.g., 10 minutes) has not expired. This w

Problems solved by technology

It has been established that the failure of medical personnel to wash their hands frequently enough leads to many infections of patients in the facilities with diseases that they did not have previously (so-called nosocomial infections).
Annually, this causes over 100,000 patient deaths and many serious new infections, often with drug resistant organisms, requiring substantial time, expense and suffering by the patients.
The cost to hospitals of nosocomial infections is very large.
Insurance providers have recently refuse to compensate hospitals for any expenses caused by such infections, as well prohibiting them from passing these costs on to patients.
As a result, hospitals suffer severe financial losses from such occurrences.
Although healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses and other personnel, have been warned and instructed in the requirements fo

Method used

the structure of the environmentally friendly knitted fabric provided by the present invention; figure 2 Flow chart of the yarn wrapping machine for environmentally friendly knitted fabrics and storage devices; image 3 Is the parameter map of the yarn covering machine
View more

Image

Smart Image Click on the blue labels to locate them in the text.
Viewing Examples
Smart Image
  • Personnel location and monitoring system and method for enclosed facilities
  • Personnel location and monitoring system and method for enclosed facilities
  • Personnel location and monitoring system and method for enclosed facilities

Examples

Experimental program
Comparison scheme
Effect test

example 1

A Given Healthcare Worker Visits Two Different Patients in an Establishment in Which the Invention is Implemented

[0173]Following is an example of a sequence of events which might occur for a given health worker.

[0174]First, the worker applies an appropriate amount of an appropriate hand wash composition to his or her hands. This may be achieved by actuating a dispenser of a composition which has been tested with the remaining components of this invention to include a taggant detectable by the sensor used in the implementation. The taggant may be alcohol included in a soap composition, or in a waterless hand hygiene composition or it may be any appropriate, non-toxic detectable volatile compound. Preferred taggants according to this invention include, but are not limited to, GRAS compounds, and compounds discussed and disclosed in, for example, US2008-0303658 and WO2008 / 154494. Alternatively, the dispenser may automatically activate upon detecting sufficiently proximate motion at a...

example 2

A Healthcare Worker That Takes a Break

[0178]As another example, assume that the healthcare worker described in EXAMPLE 1 is finished seeing patients for the time being and takes a lunch break of one half hour. If the green light on the worker's badge was on at the start of the lunch break, it automatically turns off when the pre-set time, e.g. ten minute time limit, has been exceeded.

[0179]Before the worker can resume seeing patients, he / she must again wash his / her hands in order to re-light the green LED. This is beneficial because, even though the healthcare worker has not been visiting other patients, his / her hands have been exposed to areas and surfaces in the hospital or the outside environment which might bear pathogens, and washing is, therefore, beneficial.

[0180]The record that is stored and prepared in the central computer system of the hospital will indicate when the last hand washing occurred before the worker started his / her lunch break, and will show no patient contact ...

example 3

Process Flow for Entire Operaitonal Embodiment of The Invention

[0182]To further describe the invention and enable those skilled in the art to make and use the system, the following example, with reference to FIGS. 11-15, provides a detailed process flow description of one preferred embodiment of the invention. Those skilled in the art, based on this disclosure, would be easily enabled without undue experimentation, to implement appropriate software and hardware configurations and programming, consistent with the purposes of this invention, to implement the logic flows described below.

[0183]With reference to FIG. 11, FIG. 11A provides a logic diagram showing the Hand Wash Station Process Flow 300. Starting at 301, the system performs an initialization routine on power-up. If, in the course of the initialization routine, in which a routine battery check is performed, if the battery level is low, a yellow LED is illuminated to show this condition, and the process is put into sleep mo...

the structure of the environmentally friendly knitted fabric provided by the present invention; figure 2 Flow chart of the yarn wrapping machine for environmentally friendly knitted fabrics and storage devices; image 3 Is the parameter map of the yarn covering machine
Login to view more

PUM

No PUM Login to view more

Abstract

A wireless time-of-flight distance measurement device a motion detector is used at each of a plurality of stations in a wireless network in an enclosed facility to accurately locate a badge-wearing person near the station. The location, badge number and time of detection are transmitted through the network and stored in a computer memory. In a healthcare facility, hand washing detectors are located at some of the stations and caused to energize a hand wash status indicator light on the badge when the wearer has washed his or her hands. The light remains “on” for only a certain length of time, but will be extinguished sooner by a monitor device near each patient when the healthcare worker leaves the vicinity of the patient. These events also are transmitted and stored so that a timed record of each worker's hand washing and visits to patients is created.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]This invention relates to the location and monitoring of personnel in an enclosed facility. The invention also relates to the monitoring and control of hand washing by personnel in healthcare facilities and the like.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]In many enclosed facilities, it is highly desirable or necessary to locate the positions of various personnel in the facility at various times of the day. This can be useful or necessary for purposes of monitoring the movement of people in secure facilities to make certain that they are not moving into or out of areas without authorization, to provide a record of movement by healthcare workers in hospitals, clinics and the like, and to determine when each person enters or leaves the facility.[0003]In particular, in hospitals, it is highly desirable to have a stored record of the location of each healthcare worker in the hospital throughout the working day. This can provide valuable records tending to document h...

Claims

the structure of the environmentally friendly knitted fabric provided by the present invention; figure 2 Flow chart of the yarn wrapping machine for environmentally friendly knitted fabrics and storage devices; image 3 Is the parameter map of the yarn covering machine
Login to view more

Application Information

Patent Timeline
no application Login to view more
IPC IPC(8): G08B21/00G08B23/00
CPCG06F19/327G07C9/00111G07C1/10G16H40/20G01S11/16G08B21/245G07C9/28G01S5/013
Inventor WOHLTJEN, HENRY
Owner XHALE
Who we serve
  • R&D Engineer
  • R&D Manager
  • IP Professional
Why Eureka
  • Industry Leading Data Capabilities
  • Powerful AI technology
  • Patent DNA Extraction
Social media
Try Eureka
PatSnap group products

Browse by: Latest US Patents, China's latest patents, Technical Efficacy Thesaurus, Application Domain, Technology Topic.

© 2024 PatSnap. All rights reserved.Legal|Privacy policy|Modern Slavery Act Transparency Statement|Sitemap