Proxy-Care: A novel patient care tracking system with wireless sensor networks

In the health care domain up to the 70% of the revenues can be due to the staff workload costs, which are rerouted to health care insurances and patients. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to determine how much of these costs are really due to the patient care. Some hospitals adopted Real Time Location System solutions in order to optimize staff workload. However, even though these systems are able to localize the staff inside the hospital facilities, they are not intended for computing the time spent by a caregiver while taking care of a patient. Moreover, the localization accuracy of these systems is too low to address this problem. In this paper we present Proxy-Care, a novel patient care tracking system able to compute automatically the time spent by the caregivers, differentiated by doctors, nurses and caretakers, while they are taking care of individual patients. Our results show that with Proxy-Care we are able to localize the caregiver at room level with an accuracy of 98.5%, and to recognize the proximity between the caregiver and the patient, in rooms with two or more patients, with an accuracy of 92%.