The document discusses a communication architecture developed and deployed at hospitals to enable tracking of medical staff, devices, and patients. It describes the challenges of unpredictable hospital environments and need to adapt network technologies to medical constraints. The implemented architecture included RFID tracking of staff and Bluetooth monitoring of biosensors. Key lessons were that changes must be minor and involve medical feedback, deployment must not disrupt hospital processes, and tracking raises privacy concerns requiring simple, optional services.

1. Communication architecture for
tracking and interoperable services
at hospitals: a real deployment
experience
Augusto Morales, Tomás Robles, Ramón Alcarria, David Alonso
Technical University of Madrid

2. INDEX
 Introduction
 Challenges
 Background Architecture
 From Architecture to Implementation
 Deployed Architecture and Workflow
 Lessons Learned
 Conclusions

3. INTRODUCTION
 Hospital environments
 Unpredictibility of patients, medical staff, emergencies  constantantly changing environment.
 Criticaly important communication system that carries important information.
 Issues:
Advances in network architecture,  Lack of initiatives to adapt them to many
protocols, services restrictive medical constraints
 Weak points in QoS, self-adaptation and standardization, ubiquitous communication
 Regarding interaction between the medical staff and tehnology itself.
We need adapted hospital communication Real deployment
architecture in order to support new medical experiences
services

4. CHALLENGES
 Tracking of medical devices makes up an important part of the
whole hospital process. In addition, it inherits the same deficiencies as
manual processing is in operation.
 Staff tracking is particularly challenging because it involves humans.
It is necessary in critical cases when emergencies occur or when
patients need continuous monitoring.
 Another challenge is concerning patients and their vital constant
monitoring. Hospitals have systems in order to monitor and send
alarms to medical staff when special situations occur.
 Open the possibility for potential integration with existing health
systems

5. BACKGROUND ARCHITECTURE
 Global Architecture:

6. FROM ARCHITECTURE TO IMPLEMENTATION
In any real deployment, the
architecture may be limited by the
existing physical and technological
resources of the scenario
The physical element affects many
technological factors
In our case: the physical and
technological resources available in
the Hospital did not permit the
deployment of the complete
architecture based on different roles
and servers.

7. DEPLOYED ARCHITECTURE AND WORKFLOW
External Domain
Bluetooth
(2) 3G
(3)
ethernet
(1) Wi-fi Router
Bio (4)
Sensors ethernet
Central
Hospital Network Domain Server

8. DEPLOYED ARCHITECTURE AND WORKFLOW
HEALTH STATION RFID TAGS
RFID ANTENNAS

9. LESSONS LEARNED & DISCUSSION
 Any evolution from current to future stages in any hospital systems is
difficult and risky, especially when it involves a drastic change. Some
minor changes can offer major advantages.
 Cooperation and feedback with medical staff and patients are
indispensable. Our architecture involved a human component by
suggesting to medical staff to always carry a RFID tag in their pockets.
 Since a prototype should not affect a Hospital, its normal processes
and communication systems, efficient physical deployment is a
requirement
 Our experiences in this development, via surveys, suggests to us that
tracking, which involves privacy issues, is not fully-accepted by health
personnel

10. Conclusions
We have considered many aspects such as network topology and also
exposed a realistic way to apply it.
The original architecture envisaged service creation from specialized
developers. On the other hand, the medical staff’s surveys revealed that
creating basic and simple services will be one of the best advantages for
future hospitals and AAL environments
In addition, staff location and alarms could be integrated as key service
features. Since medical staff’s tracking is still an uncompleted feature in our
system, a future architecture will have to include location policy modules
Our data analysis, which will provide us with statistical results, has not been
finalized yet, but we have learned lessons regarding this architecture and its
capabilities