Location-awareness based data dissemination for smart hospitals

In the ever growing field of health care, hospitals experience a steady increase in footfall every day. In such complex indoor environments, efficient and accurate dissemination of data becomes a challenge. The Bluetooth Special Interest Groups predicts more than 90 percent of Bluetooth-enabled smartphones will support Bluetooth Smart by 2018. As a result this paper proposes to use the recent Bluetooth Smart technology to automate the process of relevant data dissemination to patients or visitors and staff alike, based on the person´s location in the hospital. We describe the different types of data and how they are stored on a web based MySQL and PHP platform, which categorizes information based on actual physical spaces inside the hospital. Further discussion includes as to how contextual and location based data will be made available to a smart phone using a low cost and low energy Bluetooth module network, strategically distributed to allow maximum data access.