Location-aware healthcare in u-hospitals

In this paper, we will design mechanisms to provide location-aware healthcare service over IEEE 802.11 WLANs for hospitals. At medical centers, thousands of doctors, nurses, and medical staffs are scattered around the premises. Application services for internal communications such as group call or push-to-talk are desirable services for emergency rescue or information exchange. Such services are particularly demanded when the communicable diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) or bird influenza breaks out and national infection controls such as quarantine and tracking are enforced. Under certain circumstances, patients in some zones will be quarantined. To provide group call service in our system, we will develop mechanisms to facilitate the formation of a medical team in a short time right after a disease or some emergency is reported. The team members may consist of doctors, nurses, and other medical staffs who are located nearby. Group call or push to talk service is an application of Voice over IP (VoIP) over wireless networks. Considering the widely deployed WiFi systems, we will focus on IEEE 802.11 wireless networks (together with WiFi RFID technology), and provide just-in-time, location-aware service with a reasonable cost for ubiquitous healthcare at hospitals. Our system will be developed jointly with the wireless R&D team of Intel, and be deployed at National Taiwan University Hospital, in which more than 80% of the hospital is covered by WiFi. We believe that through this development, more service can be rolled out.