How Bluetooth RTLS
Solutions Can Improve
Patient Care and Minimize
the Spread of Infection

How long has this solution been in place?

Quuppa was established in 2012 by the team responsible for the invention of the High Accuracy Indoor Positioning (HAIP) at the Nokia Research Center. The founding team of Quuppa has worked with positioning technologies since the early 2000s. Based on the discovery of the superiority of the angle-of-arrival (AoA)/angle-of-departure (AoD) methods, the team developed the groundbreaking algorithms and conducted the research and testing required to solidify the technology into a proven concept. With over fifteen years of experience as its foundation, the Quuppa team commercialized their innovation to create a complete product platform – the Quuppa Intelligent Locating System™.

How does this solution benefit the healthcare industry, healthcare providers, and patients?

There are many use cases where Quuppa Bluetooth^® Direction Finding technology can fulfill healthcare requirements, especially in a hospital system where there are many regulations and laws for how care needs to be provided to patients. Location-based services enable hospitals to save lives and make the facilities safer for both staff and patients. RTLS also supports multiple solutions for improving inefficiencies in the operations of hospitals, which can save money that could otherwise be used for patient care.

Hospitals are, in general, quite hectic and stressful places for both staff and visitors. Tight rules need to be followed to avoid liabilities for a care provider. RTLS can be used to improve the user experience, even in these types of stressful environments, by providing route optimization for staff and paperless work orders and navigation services for visitors.

Can you talk about some operational improvements that can be made in hospitals to save the lives of patients?

Some ways RTLS solutions can support operational improvements include:

• • Real-time heat maps for patients and staff, showing quarantine zones, restricted areas, etc.
  • Routing patients, using location-based indoor navigation, to certain entrances and optimized routes within the facilities to help reduce viral exposure
  • Locating and visualizing assets and people, and using tracking to locate vital resources – including ventilators, wheelchairs, and other medical equipment
  • Triggering alerts when an asset enters or exits designated areas
  • Recording and playing back recorded data to trace routes through particular zones
  • Visualizing indoor data live on a location map while displaying IoT sensor data, including room temperature, equipment health, etc.
  • Analyzing counts, dwell times, and movements to assess and identifying needs or trends

What major market challenges does Bluetooth technology help you overcome?

The market still needs to understand the full potential of the Bluetooth^® Direction Finding technologies, both AoA and AoD. Too often, when people hear about Bluetooth location technology, they only think about the proximity RSSI-based Bluetooth beaconing location. Clearly, this is not the case. We are trying our best to further educate the market to showcase the full potential for Bluetooth Direction Finding technologies.

Can you tell us more about why interoperability is critical for this project?

As more and more location-based services deploy across different markets, we will see that within the same facility (from hospitals to enterprise, from smart offices to sports arena) there will be a large number of use cases all enabled by the same technology infrastructure. Therefore, having the possibility to leverage the interoperability across devices is key for such a multi-use-case scenario. Otherwise, we will fall into a very suboptimal situation where technology silos are created and facilities need to invest in a variety of technologies where each can satisfy only specific use cases.

Furthermore, both the end customers and the solution providers do not want to invest in technologies that will lock them down into working with very specific providers. Instead, the openness and interoperability of Bluetooth technology offer the possibility to adopt devices from multiple vendors, which, in return, creates a rich variety of offerings.

Are there any hospitals or organizations currently using this solution?

Current hospital deployments include:

• • Seoul National University Hospital in Korea
  • NTU Cancer Center in Taiwan
  • Nagoya University Hospital in Japan
  • Fukui University in Japan