Development of low cost and robust nursing calling device for hospitalized patients

Abstract

Patient care is considered in top priority for all clinics and hospitals. Hence it is necessary to provide a dedicated line of a mediator between nurse and patient to provide excellent patient safety and to minimize the medical errors. Till date, traditional nursing calling system was used for this purpose which limits the patient information until the nurse’s chamber and outcomes of the system depended on the nurse that sometimes fail due to unavailability or shortage of manpower. It may lead to patient death too. Therefore, this study presents a low cost and robust nursing calling system. The proposed system consists of five parts: 1) patient switch, 2) acknowledgment switch, 3) nurse center station board, 4) administrator board and 5) control board. Whenever a patient pressed the button, the signal enabled the patient’s room and bed number along with demographic details in nurse chamber for two minutes. If unattended by nurses, it passes the signal to the administrator or physician room of the hospital for the further action. In addition, it is also capable of measuring the response time delivered by the nurse to the patient which is useful for the hospital management. Specially, it was designed for those patients who have been shifted from the ICU to General Ward for the better care of them. The total cost of the device is 15$ for each bed which shows the cost effectiveness of the device. Our developed device a step ahead of existing technology by technology for the ease of patients.