Experiment Results of Seamless Navigation using IMES for Hospital Resource Management

Dinesh Manandhar, Hideyuki Torimoto, Masakazu Aihara

Abstract:	Elderly population in Japan is growing every year. By the year 2020, it is expected that 30% of total population will be above 65 years old. It is also expected that at least 10% of the elderly population need home-care services. In order to provide home-care and health-care to more than 30% of the total population is challenging and needs better health-care and home-care planning, management and services. One of the requirements to provide the services is seamless location data. It is necessary to know the location of the patients, doctors, nurses, home-care service providers (helpers) to provide the most effective services. The location data should be reliable and accurate. There are other technologies like WiFi, AGPS, Mobile Phone Signal, RF Tags, UWB and motion sensors to provide indoor position information. However, indoor location data from these signals are not reliable as they vary with respect to time and mostly limited to 2-D information. Time variable location data can’t be used in medical and home-care services since decisions and services have to be provided based on the location data. IMES has been selected for medical and home-care services due to its reliability and availability of Floor ID in addition to 3-D location data. The IMES location data is also related with the Survey Department’s “Location Information Code”. The objective of this research is to develop a health-care and home-care service system based on indoor location data using IMES. It includes check-in services, monitoring of off-limit areas, monitoring of patients and medical staffs, urgent and emergency calling and management of home-care system. The system requires monitoring and management of human resources as well as logistics with 3-D position information both indoors (latitude, longitude, floor ID) and outdoors (latitude, longitude, height) in seamless fashion. In this paper, IMES setup and testing in different premises of the hospital and development of home-care system using android tablet are presented. The paper also includes a comparison of results between IMES and other indoor position systems (basically WiFi) to show the importance of IMES for indoor position. The results show the effectiveness of using IMES location data for health-care and home-care services.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012) September 17 - 21, 2012 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	976 - 982
Cite this article:	Manandhar, Dinesh, Torimoto, Hideyuki, Aihara, Masakazu, "Experiment Results of Seamless Navigation using IMES for Hospital Resource Management," Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012), Nashville, TN, September 2012, pp. 976-982.
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