Wearable sensors to capture human location and proximity data

Centre for health informatics

Research stream

Patient Safety Informatics

Project members

Dr Didi Surian
Satya Vedantam 
Professor Enrico Coiera

Project contact

Dr Didi Surian
E: didi.surian@mq.edu.au

Project main description

Monitoring the paths or locations that individuals traverse and proximity to others in an indoor environment, such as a hospital, is important especially in modelling the spread of infectious diseases. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) proximity sensors have been investigated for indoor tracking and has been shown to be able to accurately predict the location of a user.

The goals of this project are:

1. To conduct a technical trial of Bluetooth proximity sensors in a clinical ward to test their suitability within this environment, their acceptability by staff and patients, and their technical performance.
2. To obtain and examine human location and movement data from the sensors in a clinical ward and then evaluate the data to assess accuracy and fidelity and to assess whether they are sufficiently sensitive and specific to support infection control decision-making.

We developed a new method based on the received number of signals indicator (RNSI) and compared it to a standard received signal strength indicator (RSSI)-based method for predicting user location. We performed experiments in an office environment and a tertiary hospital in NSW. Our results indicate that the RNSI-based method could be useful to track the locations of a moving user in an indoor environment without involving complex calibration. This is very useful especially when deploying the system in a new environment. RNSI has the potential to be used together with other methods in more robust indoor positioning systems.

References

1. Surian, D., et al., Tracking a moving user in indoor environments using Bluetooth low energy beacons. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2019. 98: p. 103288. [doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103288]

Project sponsors

• The NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Emerging Infection Diseases Grant (APP1102962)

Collaborative partners

• Prof Vitali Sintchenko, Sydney Medical School and Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; Centre for Infectious Disease and Microbiology-Public Health, ICPMR, Westmead Hospital, Sydney, Australia
• Macquarie University Hospital

Project status

Current

Centres related to this project

Centre for Health Informatics