Medical facilities, such as hospitals, face many challenges in addition to simply caring for patients. For example, securing patients and equipment (e.g., medical devices) consumes many resources and current methods lack effectiveness. In addition to requiring personnel to physically monitor locations within the facility, visitor logs and visitor badges, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology are often utilized to control access to certain locations within the facility. However, each of these require subjective decision-making and are prone to error by the personnel monitoring the locations or assisting visitors signing a visitor log and issuing visitor badges accordingly. Further, none of these methods necessarily prevent an authorized visitor from breaching areas of the facility where the authorized visitor is not authorized. For example, a visitor may be authorized to visit a particular patient but, based on some condition of the patient, may not have close contact with the patient. In contrast, a caregiver of the same patient may need to have close contact with the patient. Additionally, in some situations, an authorized visitor may unwittingly provide contraband (e.g., some thing or some object a particular patient is not allowed) to a patient that the current methods are unable to detect. Finally, medical devices are constantly being shuffled between patients and locations within a facility. Tracking the locations of these devices can be extremely difficult. Accordingly, overall security for patients and equipment suffers and the many resources currently being utilized are wasted.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds