Personnel location and monitoring system and method for enclosed facilities

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...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0015]The present invention provides a system which facilitates precise location of individuals in a facility and which correlates the location of such individuals with proximate contact with other individuals (patients in a hospital, other healthcare facilities; skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, for example), and the status of the individual's hand wash compliance status at the time and location of such proximate contact with other individuals. It will be appreciated that while the present system is exemplified with reference principally to a hospital environment, other environments, including but not limited to other healthcare environments, food handling environments, computer clean room and other manufacturing environments, may likewise benefit from implementation of various embodiments of the systems and methods disclosed and described herein.

[0017]Specifically, it is an object to provide a wireless system and method which is extremely robust and error-free in detecting the whereabouts of personnel, and hand wash status of medical or other personnel, in an enclosed facility.

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 for hand washing, the degree of compliance often is mediocre to poor.

As a result, infection rates attributable to inadequate hand wash compliance in hospitals and other healthcare facilities are unacceptably high.

However, such prior systems are believed to be deficient and are not believed to be in widespread use.

Another problem in healthcare facilities is the monitoring of the visits of the personnel to specific patients, and the hand wash status of such personnel before, during and after each such visit.

A further problem is that the accuracy and reliability of techniques and devices for monitoring hand wash status by healthcare personnel need improvement so that the need for hand washing is indicated reliably and can be used by the healthcare personnel themselves, as well as patients and others, to reliably indicate the need for the hands to be washed.

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