the 4th COE Postdoctoral and Doctoral
Researchers Technical Presentation

Automatic Location Systemusing Active IR-tag

Background
Digitalization of medical service

Muneyuki Sakata
Image Processing Laboratory
2004/07/22

Location in hospital

Electronic medical chart
Wireless LAN, Mobile Computer
IC tag, Bar-code …

A large floor in a hospital is covered bylimited number of nurses and effective
collaborations are needed.
taking other’s placegiving a handgather some others

Objective

Hospital Staff’s work is performedin the place appointed for each work.

Location system for nursing activityMeasurement of body temperature
beside patient’s bed
 Preparation of intravenous drip or medicine
in front of medicine cabinet
 At a staff meetingaround center table of nurse station

Requirements

Spatiotemporal location information
implies the staff’s activity

Expected utilities
of location system
The staff can …
locate each other for correspondence.
make working report automatically.

The manager can …
monitor staffs’ activities for organizing themeffectively.
 analyze the working performance to verify andimprove the nursing work.
High accuracyex.) in front of which desk, which part of the roomDon’t disturb nursing work
 Smaller user’s equipments
 Automatically tracking and identificationSimple infrastructure

Related work
Autonomous positioning system(Konishi at al.,Tokyo University)○ No sensor in environment
× Large user’s system / Accumulative error

Easy Living
ActiveBat(AT&T,1997)(Microsoft,2000)

Using Radio Wave and Ultrasound(Active Bat (AT&T))○ High positioning accuracy
× Too many sensors are needed

Image processing using camera image(Easy Living (Microsoft))○ User has no devices
× Need some action to identify user
(Konishi at el., 2001)

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ALTAIR(Automatic Location Tracking system using Active IR-tag)

Proposed Method
IR tracking
 IR wide-angle camera+ IR marker(IR-tag)

Automatic locating and identification~0.5m accuracy
Simple infrastructure Sparse set up with limited
number of sensors
 Stably extract the marker
from IR image

ALTAIR uses

Control lighting patternof IR-tag via network

Wireless LAN
 IR-tag IR-filtered wide-angle camera


System (user’s system)
Wireless LANIR-LEDsSystem(one section)
IR wide-angle camera

・PDA(Zaurus,Sharp)
・Wireless LAN・PIC・IR-LEDs

PIC

Tracks lights
of all IR-tags
 Calculates IR-tags’
positions Detects blinking IR-tag

PDALocal Location-Manager(LLM):
Merges information from cameras
Sequentially instructs IR-tags of all users to blink
Updates user location and identification


System(servers)

Sample application
RoomTime, User-ID , Room ,Position(x,y)
set of data

User nameTrace the user’s movequery

Review application
Datevisualization inputTime2

Future Work

Summary

Contiguous multiple area system

In order to achieve a nursing work
effectively and analyze working
performance, dynamic monitoring andaccumulating staff’s location areconsiderable.
I proposed automatic location tracking
system using active IR-tag.
ALTAIR has both problems to be solved andcapabilities to improve in my future work

Detection of enter / leave a section
using wireless network technology

Review application
Analyze from various aspects

Linking to other data resource

Video Streaming, Medical chart,
Output of medical devices…

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