--- title: "IOT Solutions for Hospitals" url: "https://maker.wiznet.io/siva_ranjeet/projects/iot-solutions-for-hospitals/" markdown_url: "https://maker.wiznet.io/siva_ranjeet/projects/iot-solutions-for-hospitals/md" type: "UCC: User Created Content" author: "Aditi S. Patade, Hetvi P. Gandhi, Nidhi Sharma" author_url: "https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8711425" editor: "WIZnet" editor_url: "https://maker.wiznet.io/" original_author: "Aditi S. Patade, Hetvi P. Gandhi, Nidhi Sharma" original_url: "https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8711425" published: "2022-09-02" language: "en" hardware: ["Tomson Electronics MQ 6 - Gas Leakage Sensor Module", "Arduino UNO Wifi Rev.2", "Arduino Ethernet Shield", "NodeMCU ESP8266 Breakout Board"] likes: 5 views: 1394 comments: 1 source: "WIZnet Makers (https://maker.wiznet.io/)" --- # IOT Solutions for Hospitals > The main objective of this SMART hospital is patient safety and to regulate the excessive power consumption. Original author: Aditi S. Patade, Hetvi P. Gandhi, Nidhi Sharma (source: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8711425) ## Components - **Tomson Electronics MQ 6 - Gas Leakage Sensor Module** x 1 - **Arduino UNO Wifi Rev.2** x 1 ([docs](https://store.arduino.cc/arduino-uno-wifi-rev2)) - **Arduino Ethernet Shield** x 1 ([docs](https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/shields/arduino-ethernet-shield-without-poe-module)) - **NodeMCU ESP8266 Breakout Board** x 1 ([docs](https://www.banggood.com/NodeMcu-Lua-WIFI-Development-Board-For-ESP8266-Module-p-976440.html?akmClientCountry=Korea&p=PU22124098863201603C&cur_warehouse=CN)) - Software: **Arduino IDE** ([docs](https://www.arduino.cc/en/software)) ## Article #### INTRODUCTION The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity which enable these things to connect, collect and exchange. A broad use of IOT in hospitals promises to enhance health, safety, operational efficiency and the patient and resident experience. Apart from improving patient experience, its implementation surpasses the ease of staff flow. Venous air embolism occurs when gas molecules enters a venous structure and travels through the right part of the heart to the pulmonary circulation. Criteria for the entry of gas into the venous system are the access of veins during the presence of negative pressure in these vessels, which is most commonly associated with central venous catheterization, as the potential for negative pressure exists in the thoracic vessels due to respiration. Such condition is expected to take place in hospitals where Saline bottle level needs to be constantly monitored. If not monitored properly, an empty bottle may cause negative pressure gradient between patient’s blood flow and empty saline bottle, thus causing outward flow of blood into saline bottle. This may happen in stressed and busy environment like government hospitals where patient to staff ratio is exceeding hospital’s capacity. Therefore to avoid this condition a saline holder has been designed by means of IOT (Internet Of Things) ; which will not only improve the chances of patient safety but will also avoid the diagnosis and treatment time for such condition. IOT proves to be a boon to monitor the desired conditions and alarm the user whenever threshold is exceeded. Fires can be devastating, mainly in a place like hospital where a large number of people who need to be evacuated are vulnerable, immune- compromised, on life support, and incapable of moving on their own. To prevent the hospital fire and to speed up the evacuation process, IR Led were interfaced with IOT platform which would alarm the users about the presence of fire by checking the change in ambient temperature. Another problem that private or government hospitals are facing is the wastage in electricity by not switching off the lights and fans, when not required. According to the report of Energy Conservation and commercialization program in January 2000, Lighting can account for over 20% to 28% of the total energy use of the electricity used in a typical hospital. ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662395177%2Epng) #### RELATED WORK This section surveys previous ideas proposed to design hospitals using IOT. The idea of IOT solutions was proposed in the paper titled “SMART hospital using IOT”, which identified the problem of air embolism in the IV line, excessive use of electricity and hospital fires. The approach used in said paper to tackle the mentioned issues were adapted and improvised in this paper by using sophisticated sensors and simulating the sensors to the near to actual conditions. #### WORKFLOW ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662395368%2Epng) Basic low power IOT devices like Arduino Ethernet Shield W5100-R3 and Node MCU was used in the backend along with the sensors, to design a working prototype of this system. At the same time, user friendly IOT platform- Blynk was used in frontend as a medium to monitor the sensors and to prompt the sensors activity to the users when set threshold was exceeded. The Arduino Ethernet Shield allows an Arduino microcontroller to connect to the internet. It is based on the WIZnet W5500 Ethernet chip technology. The WIZnet W5500 provides a network (IP) stack capable of both TCP and UDP. Blynk, an open source IOT platform connects to the Ethernet shield and therefore to the sensors via Wi-Fi. It uses the concept of AUTH token, which is given to the device- every time the Blynk APIs are hit with a AUTH token, it connects to the app and shield sends the sensor data to the frontend app. Node MCU, on the other hand, is a compact microcontroller which directly connects to the Wi-Fi and then to the app. #### COMPONENTS **MQ-6 Gas Sensor ** Sensitive material used in MQ-6 gas sensor is SnO2, which exhibits lower conductivity in clean air. When the gas sensor is exposed to the target flammable gas, the sensor’s conductivity rises. This increase in the conductivity leads to an increase in the gas concentration. MQ-6 gas sensor exhibits sensitivity to various kinds of flammable gases, especially has high sensitivity to LPG (propane). It is a kind of low-cost sensor for many applications. It has good sensitivity to flammable gas (especially propane) in an extensive range and has advantages such as long lifespan, low cost, and a simple drive circuit. Its major application is that it is widely used in domestic gas leakage alarm, industrial flammable gas alarm and portable gas detector. MQ6 sensor has a high sensitivity and fast response time hence they can be used as safety measures in work places such as hospitals and home to avoid hazardous situations. The sensor can be used to generate an alarm to notify the officials or to activate a system to shut down the gas flow. **IR LED ** An Infrared light emitting diode (IR LED) is a special purpose LED emitting infrared rays ranging from 700 nm to 1 mm wavelength. IR LEDs are usually made up of semiconductor materials like gallium arsenide or aluminum gallium arsenide. They are commonly used as a sensor when combined with IR receivers. An IR sensor consists of two parts, the emitter circuit which emits IR waves, and the receiver circuit which detects IR light. This is collectively known as a photo-coupler or an optocoupler. It works on the principle that the emitter is an IR LED and the detector is an IR photodiode. The IR photodiode is sensitive to the IR light emitted by an IR LED. The photodiode’s resistance and output voltage change in proportion to the IR light received . ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662403566%2Epng) **Arduino UNO ** Arduino is a rudimental single board microcontroller designed to make applications, interactive controls, or environments facilely adaptive. The hardware consists of a board designed around an 8-bit microcontroller, or a 32-bit ARM. Its current models feature things like a USB interface, analog inputs, and GPIO pins which sanction the utilizer to annex supplemental boards. **Ethernet Shield ** The Ethernet Shield connects to an Arduino Board using long wire-wrap headers extending through the Shield. This keeps the pin layout intact and allows another Shield to be stacked on top of it. The Ethernet Shield 2 has a standard RJ-45 connection, with an integrated line transformer and Power over Ethernet enabled. The advantages of shields over the separate modules are that shields are specifically designed for the Arduino. This makes it easier to connect them and is less error-prone than if it were to start connecting some module wire after wire. **Node MCU ** Node MCU is an open source IoT platform. It includes firmware which runs on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi SoC from Espressif Systems, and hardware which is based on the ESP-12 module. The term "Node MCU" by default refers to the firmware rather than the development kits. Node MCU was used as a separate microcontroller plus Wi-Fi shield for the saline holder. IR LEDs in the saline holder was connected to the internet using this microcontroller. #### DESIGN AND FUNCTIONALITY **Saline Holder for prevention of Air Embolism ** Saline Holder was designed to monitor the saline level in the bottle using IR LED. After subjecting IR LED to various levels of a liquid, it was inferred that the intensity of IR light passing through the transparent liquid is inversely proportional to the output voltage values. Therefore, a threshold was set such that as the level of the saline decreases, the analog values coming from sensor will cross the threshold, thus triggering a notification to the user (nurse to be precise). This notification will be triggered 5 minutes before the saline bottle gets completely empty, giving user a margin of 5 minutes to take action. ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662403731%2Epng) Monitoring and notifying the user about this activity will prevent the chances of air embolism at an initial stage. Also, the holder is designed to be rigid such that it will avoid swinging the bottle while transporting the patient, preventing any air bubbles in the bottle or IV line. ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662403776%2Epng) #### **Gas Detection to prevent Hospital Fires ** IR LED were interfaced with Ethernet shield and the sensor was simulated with a smoke as well as fire. It was noted that the MQ-6 sensor was more sensitive to smoke than fire which explains the fact that the smoke molecules reacts with the resistive material in the sensor, thus changing the resistance of the sensing material i.e. tin dioxide. This principle is useful in surgical departments which faces gas leak prior to fire. **Motion Detection to reduce excessive power consumption ** The versatility of IR led in liquids and solids was tested by checking the IR intensity against transparent, opaque and translucent objects. This functionality was tested by simulating the IR led with heat emitting bodies or opaque objects. The IR led were in normally OFF state except when they were exposed to the opaque objects, the IR light would reflect from the surface which was captured by the photo detector placed adjacent to the IR emitter. In response to the object, a led would glow, which was used as analogous to the lightings used in the hospitals. #### RESULT AND CONCLUSIONS **Saline Holder for prevention of Air Embolism ** Fig 6 shows the results obtained from an experiment of subjecting IR led to the various levels of saline. It is clear from the line chart that as saline level decreases i.e. from 500 ml to 300 ml, analog values are increasing and the values are highest at sensor level i.e. IR light is passing through a transparent object without any liquid to attenuate its intensity. Fig 7 shows the front end notification obtained in the Blynk app. It was observed that Blynk App was way faster than the previous platform, as it was generating alerts as soon as the saline level was below the threshold, provided internet connection was strong. This allowed the user to change the bottle in the safe duration after notification. ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662403941%2Epng) **Gas Detection to prevent Hospital Fires. ** Integrating Blynk App with the hardware gave an advantage to decrease the detection time of the smoke (time between the actual smoke started and detected by the sensor). Therefore, the notification was generated within a matter of seconds. Other than the Blynk App, red led was used at the sensor side to mark the increase in resistance of the sensitive material in the gas sensor. ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662404035%2Epng) MQ 6 which is a smoke sensor was used with the expectation of detecting fire at an early stage; however, Operation Theater which is one of the critical aspects of a hospital is also a reason behind hospital fires. Since operation theaters are equipped with anesthesia machines which have flammable gases vapors such as cyclo-propane, divinyl ether, ethyl chloride, ethyl ether, and ethylene, which may form flammable explosive mixtures with air, oxygen, or nitrous oxide. Leakage of such gases also marks the early stage of the fire, since their leakage can be a source of fire. It can be concluded that using merely a gas sensor cannot be a universally acceptable solution. This calls for a need to employ a fire sensor along with a gas sensor to detect the early stages of fire in hospitals. Importance of using fire detector can be highlighted by the fact that they detect the presence of fire by monitoring the changes in environment associated with combustion. **Motion Detection to reduce excessive power consumption** Fig 7 shows the behavior of IR led when exposed to transparent, opaque and translucent objects. It was noted that the IR intensity is highest in transparent objects and lowest when no object was placed in front of the led, thus explaining the operation of IR led as a switch. ![](https://maker.wiznet.io/upload/ckeditor5/739906759%5F1662404111%2Epng) It was observed that IR led is exceptionally sensitive to the ambient temperature. The changes in the sensor values were noticed when the room temperature was altered. This calls for a need to calibrate the IR led according to the environmental temperature. Employing such systems in hospital is expected to reduce the power consumption. --- Source: https://maker.wiznet.io/siva_ranjeet/projects/iot-solutions-for-hospitals/