Sato Healthcare and Nagoya University Hospital have announced the Smart Hospital initiative, a joint proof of concept (PoC) led by Nagoya University Hospital’s Medical IT Center, which seeks to improve service and patient safety using cutting-edge connected IoT technologies. The initiative seeks to bring about revolutionary service and patient safety improvements with ICT/IoT technology through the joint development of a new service model.

Test development of the new system involving both hospital staff and patients will commence during February 2018.

The research seeks to improve visualization and achieve appropriate staffing levels at peak hospital hours while speeding services when emergency care is needed. It does so by tracking work processes of hospital staff and vital signs of patients with IoT wearable devices that capture, log and visualize data on location and health status. Sato Healthcare provided a high precision indoor location system to detect the location of workers down to the accuracy of the hospital bed.

The system allows excellent visualization of hospital workers’ movement to understand their interactions and communication with patients, as well as work status. Using a beacon that monitors patients’ vital signs such as heart rate, physical activity, stress level and more, the system will capture data in real-time for immediate visualization of stress levels and changes in health conditions.

Nagoya University Hospital Medical IT Center lead principal investigator and researcher Dr. Shintaro Oyama says, “We feel that improving the safety of inpatient service is a crucial challenge and the core of this Smart Hospital initiative. Thanks to the solution from Sato Healthcare and our research, we will provide a new inpatient experience and services to provide unparalleled reassurance to patients. With AI, we will use the captured data to analyze and develop systems to prevent incidents.”

President of Sato Healthcare Hiroyuki Konuma adds, “We continually seek to provide one-stop solutions that capture accurate data for healthcare providers and support the working environment of medical professionals to help patients achieve peace of mind.”