While there are numerous causes of waste in the healthcare system, some of this waste is associated with inefficiency. Among the proposed solutions to address inefficiency is clinic layout optimization. Such optimization depends on how operating resources and instruments are placed in the clinic, in what order they are accessed to attain a particular task, and the mobility of clinicians between different clinic rooms to accomplish different clinic tasks. Traditionally, such optimization research involves manual monitoring by human proctors, which is time consuming, erroneous, unproductive, and subjective. If mobility patterns in an indoor space can be determined automatically in real time, layout and operation-related optimization decisions based on these patterns can be implemented accurately and continuously in a timely fashion. This paper explores this application domain where precise localization is not required; however, the determination of mobility is essential on a real-time basis. Given that, this research explores how only mobile devices and their built-in Bluetooth received signal strength indicator (RSSI) can be used to determine such mobility. With a collection of stationary mobile devices, with their computational and networking capabilities and lack of energy requirements, the mobility of moving mobile devices was determined. The research methodology involves developing two new algorithms that use raw RSSI data to create visualizations of movements across different operational units identified by stationary nodes. Compared with similar approaches, this research showcases that the method presented in this paper is viable and can produce mobility patterns in indoor spaces that can be utilized further for data analysis and visualization.
more »
« less
Using RSSI to Form Path in an Indoor Space
Generating paths of a mobile device in indoor space by sensing its Bluetooth RSSI value is challenging but has real-world applications. Although Bluetooth RSSI suffers from different factors that limit its usability, this research shows that it can still be used to detect mobility and, over a duration of time, can be used to form paths. This poster presents algorithms that can create a path of a moving mobile device by sensing its RSSI values over time and then presents early results of the algorithm's effectiveness while tracking health practitioners' movement within a community care clinic setting.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2131100
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10354388
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 2
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
more » « less
This article presents a method to monitor corrosion remotely, based on highly nonlinear solitary waves, which are compact and nondispersive. In the study presented in this article, two types of solitary wave transducers were used to monitor accelerated localized corrosion on a steel plate. The first type consists of a chain of spherical particles surmounted by a commercial solenoid wired to, and controlled by, a data acquisition system used to lift and release the first particle of the chain and induce the mechanical impacts and stress waves in the chain. The chain included a piezoelectric wafer disk, also wired to the same data acquisition system, to sense, digitize, and store the propagating waves for post-processing. The second type of transducer was identical to the first one but the data acquisition system was replaced by a wireless node that communicated with a mobile device using a Bluetooth connection. Eight transducers were used to monitor the plate for over a week to detect the onset and progression of localized corrosion. Corrosion detection was performed by extracting a few features from the time waveforms and feeding these features to an outlier analysis algorithm based on the Mahalanobis distance. The results of the experiment showed the effectiveness of the proposed monitoring approach at detecting defects close to the transducers and confirm previous numerical predictions by the authors. The experiments also provided evidence that the performance of the wireless transducers is nearly identical to the performance of their wired counterparts, paving the way to a new paradigm for the structural health monitoring of remote structural components in harsh environments.
-
Mobility tracking of IoT devices in smart city infrastructures such as smart buildings, hospitals, shopping centers, warehouses, smart streets, and outdoor spaces has many applications. Since Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is available in almost every IoT device in the market nowadays, a key to localizing and tracking IoT devices is to develop an accurate ranging technique for BLE-enabled IoT devices. This is, however, a challenging feat as billions of these devices are already in use, and for pragmatic reasons, we cannot propose to modify the IoT device (a BLE peripheral) itself. Furthermore, unlike WiFi ranging - where the channel state information (CSI) is readily available and the bandwidth can be increased by stitching 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands together to achieve a high-precision ranging, an unmodified BLE peripheral provides us with only the RSSI information over a very limited bandwidth. Accurately ranging a BLE device is therefore far more challenging than other wireless standards. In this paper, we exploit characteristics of BLE protocol (e.g. frequency hopping and empty control packet transmissions) and propose a technique to directly estimate the range of a BLE peripheral from a BLE access point by multipath profiling. We discuss the theoretical foundation and conduct experiments to show that the technique achieves a 2.44m absolute range estimation error on average.more » « less
-
In modern healthcare, smart medical devices are used to ensure better and informed patient care. Such devices have the capability to connect to and communicate with the hospital's network or a mobile application over wi-fi or Bluetooth, allowing doctors to remotely configure them, exchange data, or update the firmware. For example, Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Devices (CIED), more commonly known as Pacemakers, are increasingly becoming smarter, connected to the cloud or healthcare information systems, and capable of being programmed remotely. Healthcare providers can upload new configurations to such devices to change the treatment. Such configurations are often exchanged, reused, and/or modified to match the patient's specific health scenario. Such capabilities, unfortunately, come at a price. Malicious entities can provide a faulty configuration to such devices, leading to the patient's death. Any update to the state or configuration of such devices must be thoroughly vetted before applying them to the device. In case of any adverse events, we must also be able to trace the lineage and propagation of the faulty configuration to determine the cause and liability issues. In a highly distributed environment such as today's hospitals, ensuring the integrity of configurations and security policies is difficult and often requires a complex setup. As configurations propagate, traditional access control and authentication of the healthcare provider applying the configuration is not enough to prevent installation of malicious configurations. In this paper, we argue that a provenance-based approach can provide an effective solution towards hardening the security of such medical devices. In this approach, devices would maintain a verifiable provenance chain that would allow assessing not just the current state, but also the past history of the configuration of the device. Also, any configuration update would be accompanied by its own secure provenance chain, allowing verification of the origin and lineage of the configuration. The ability to protect and verify the provenance of devices and configurations would lead to better patient care, prevent malfunction of the device due to malicious configurations, and allow after-the-fact investigation of device configuration issues. In this paper, we advocate the benefits of such an approach and sketch the requirements, implementation challenges, and deployment strategies for such a provenance-based system.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Continuum robots have high degrees of freedom and the ability to safely move in constrained environments. One class of soft continuum robot is the “vine” robot. This type of robot extends from its tip by everting or unfurling new material, driven by internal body pressure. Most vine robot examples store new body material in a reel at their base, passing it through the core of the robot to the tip, and like many continuum robots, steer by selectively lengthening or shortening one side of the body. While this approach to steering and material storage lends itself to a fully soft device, it has three key limitations: (i) internal friction of material passing through the core of the robot limits its length in tortuous paths, (ii) body buckling as the robot's body material is re-spooled at the base can prevent retraction, and (iii) constant curvature steering limits the robot's poses and object approach angles in a given workspace. This letter presents a hybrid soft-rigid robotic system comprising a soft vine robot body and a rigid, mobile, internal steering-reeling mechanism (SRM); this SRM is equipped with a reel for material storage, a bending actuator for steering, and is capable of actuating the robot at any point along its length. This hybrid configuration increases reach along tortuous paths, allows retraction, and increases the workspace. We describe the motivation for the device, generate its mathematical models, present its methods of operation, and verify experimentally the models we developed and the performance improvements over previous vine robots.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN54977.2022.9868912
