A Beacon-Based Indoor Positioning System for Location Tracking of Patients in Hospital

This paper offers an indoor, beacon based positioning system for a hospital environment. Its main goal is to provide to a hospital staff the ability to track the movement of patients and quickly to locate their position in order to prevent unauthorized departure and to increase security in hospital wards, both under normal conditions and in compliance with a quarantine. The proposed system uses two approaches that are based on heuristic algorithms. The first one determines the number and location of Bluetooth Low Energy beacons in the territory of the target building. The other one is a method for indoor positioning of a mobile device - a specialized bracelet that uses Bluetooth Low Energy beacons as. reference points. The results of stimulation experiments show that the combination of these both components of such indoor positioning system can be an effective solution for locating and tracking patients in a hospital.