# Bluetooth-Based Healthcare Information and Medical Resource Management System
## 3 Materials and Methods  
In today's environment of a severe shortage of medical manpower, the problem of high nurse-patient ratio, which means that each healthcare worker is often responsible for the care of several patients, puts the healthcare workers in medical institutions under considerable work pressure [35]. In addition to patient care, the management of medical equipment and devices is also part of the work of healthcare workers. However, due to the large number and complexity of medical equipment and devices, management problems can easily arise [28]. For example, many devices are often not returned after being rented by patients or other healthcare workers, and the incorrect quantity of these devices is onlyfound when taking inventory of the equipment, requiring time to retrieve these devices and thus creating an additional workload for healthcare workers. In this study, we developed a Bluetooth data collector, an App, and a cloud server to build an Internet of Things (IoT) environment for healthcare information/medical resource management in an integrated manner based on the temperature measurement smart T-shirt (body temperature sensor) and the smart adult diaper (diaper humidity sensor) developed by [PERSON] [36] as shown in Figures 4 and 5. The MQTT protocol of the IoT is used to integrate various medical and healthcare-related information. First of all, in healthcare information management, we developed a Bluetooth data collector to steadily collect, classify, and integrate patient physiological information measured by various medical sensors and then transmit it to a database for storage. Secondly, in medical resource management, we managed to locate and track hospital equipment and devices through the deployment of positioning devices. Finally, the system establishes a dissemination server responsible for the timely dissemination of information in response to alert messages. Therefore, this study implements a medical information management platform through the Internet of Things (IoT) transmission protocol, MQTT, to integrate the work information of healthcare workers, and its protocol hierarchy is shown in Figure 6. The platform provides three different types of agents, namely, Monitoring Agent, Positioning Agent, and Exchanging Agent. Medical Data Monitoring, Medical Equipment Positioning, and  
Figure 4: (**a**) Temperature measurement smart T-shirt and (**b**) smart adult diaper. Figure 5: (**a**) Tag of temperature measurement smart T-shirt and (**b**) tag of smart adult diaper. Message Exchanging help healthcare professionals quickly grasp the real-time situation of patients and track the positioning of medical equipment and devices to facilitate the management of medical staff, reducing the workload of medical staff. In addition, the presented system also copes with the lack of security mechanism in the information transmission process of the MQTT protocol and conducts data content protection [37], which is to design a security mechanism (Secure MQTT) on top of the MQTT protocol to encrypt and protect the content of the information transmission. The platform allows healthcare users to transfer and exchange data with confidence to avoid the leakage of patients' private information. Figure 7a shows the system usage scenarios, where care recipients wear smart T-shirts/diapers in the ward, and the Bluetooth Hub at the entrance of the ward and the APP-Hub (either BT or WiFi) on the smartphone are running the information collection program to collect the body temperature and diaper humidity information of the care recipient through the multi-channel Bluetooth transmission protocol. Figure 7b,c illustrate the workflow chart for smart sensors used to collect physiological data and Bluetooth tags used for indoor positioning, respectively. The Bluetooth Hub sends physiological data to the system server. The system server can transmit notifications/alerts (work coordination information exchange or indoor position information) to smartphones via WiFi/4G.