# Empowering Clinical Engineering and Evidence-Based Maintenance with IoT and Indoor Navigation +
### Unmet Needs  
Planned and corrective maintenance interventions require technical personnel to access internal department spaces to locate targeted devices. These interventions are susceptible to potential failures due to various reasons, highlighting a series of unmet needs (UNs):  
* UN 1: Technicians require assurance that the devices slated for maintenance are not in use by healthcare staff upon their arrival.
* UN 2: Technicians need the certainty that the devices are easily locatable; however, instances often arise where the devices are untraceable or loaned to another department.
* UN 3: Maintenance of devices must not impede the interaction between healthcare and technical staff.
* UN 4: Suppliers and biomedical technicians (BMETs) need accurate information on how to reach the assigned devices. Outdated knowledge of department layouts poses challenges for external personnel navigating within the structures.  
Currently, healthcare organizations struggle to adopt effective medical equipment maintenance management without suitable systematic procedures and planning. Maintenance, service, and restoration of this equipment are time-consuming procedures. Thus, if the maintenance activity is performed ineffectively, the equipment may remain unavailable for an extended time [10]. A well-organized approach is required to guarantee that the equipment selected for inspection or repair is available at a designated hot-spot collection area inside the department. In the realm of clinical engineering (CE), the absence of a universally agreed-upon \"Electro-medical Equipment Hub\" (EEH), which refers to an area or room within wards where devices are handed over on the intervention day, necessitates that technicians disrupt healthcare processes to access devices.  
The maintenance of medical equipment becomes more expensive every year, and hospital management structures are constantly looking for solutions to extend the life of the equipment to optimize maintenance programs and reduce the total cost of ownership through the efficient use of available resources [11]. Maintenance activities are broadly categorized into \"corrective maintenance\" (CM) and \"scheduled maintenance\" (SM). The former is a type of maintenance task performed after an equipment failure, referring to all activities that restore failed or broken-down assets to their normal working condition, while the latter involves scheduled activities performed before equipment failure, grouping all activities that maintain assets and prevent them from failure or breakdown. In this context, real-world data (RWD), i.e., observational data associated with outcomes in real-world settings, can be leveraged to generate real-world evidence (RWE). This evidence aids in assessing the effectiveness and safety of health technologies by examining both the intended and unintended consequences of their use. Unfortunately, computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software often only contains descriptions of failures, repair procedures, and spare parts used, lacking information about measures needed to prevent failures [12]. On the other hand, evidence-based maintenance (EBM), a systematic process that examines the root causes of equipment malfunctions, can improve maintenance methodologies continuously by harnessing empirical RWD and scientific research. EBM identifies the most effective maintenance strategies for medical devices, to bolster efficiency, dependability, and safety [13].