Towards an implementation of Smart Hospital: A localization system for mobile users and devices

The advancements of wireless and mobile computing technologies and the diffusion of Pervasive Healthcare technologies are changing our perception of healthcare. In this paper, we describe how the Pervasive Computing technologies can be used to build a Smart Hospital. In particular, we propose a concrete implementation of a Smart Hospital and discuss how e-Health services and applications can be enhanced by location information. As a solution, we present semantic models, mechanisms and a system to locate diverse kinds of mobile entities in Smart Hospitals. The key feature of the system is the semantic integration of different positioning systems that not only enables the hospital to transparently handle such physical positioning systems, but also to reason on location information coming from different systems and to combine them in order to get higher context information or to resolve inconsistencies or conflicts due to sensing errors or limitations of the positioning systems. © 2008 IEEE.