Towards an RTLS-based hand hygiene notification system

Rising infection rates in healthcare is a global issue that causes complications for the patient, extended hospital stay, financial difficulties, and even death. One of the crucial factors that reduce those infections is better hand hygiene. Due to the lack of automated systems that could help monitoring hand hygiene compliance and reporting on collected data, some hospitals use direct observations, surveys, dispensers usage measurements and other such methods to monitor the compliance of care providers. This paper proposes an alternative system that takes advantage of emerging off-the-shelf infrastructures in hospitals, and in particular of Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) and intelligent hand sanitizer dispensers. Our RTLS-based approach improves upon the current methods by enabling interactions with care providers through notifications when they do not execute expected hand hygiene actions during care processes, even for fine-grained location situations.