iResTrac: an architecture for maintaining medical resource status with mobile devices

In this paper, we introduce iResTrac, a mobile device application and service-oriented architecture for capturing and retrieving hospital resource information such as beds or ventilators. Our system leverages the continuing penetration of smartphones in the hospital environment to provide medical, cleaning, and maintenance staff with an application that allows them to use a smartphone to scan barcodes to acquire and update information about resources. This solution does not require an additional hardware infrastructure like that required by RFID tags. It uses existing hospital Wi-Fi infrastructure that allows the application to access an in-house web service that exposes methods to update and retrieve information. In addition, the system provides a dashboard application that can be viewed in a traditional web browser or optimized for a tablet device.