Location Awareness in HealthCare

Waiting for patients and looking for or loosing assets in healthcare costs millions/year and may cause considerable annoyance for caregivers and additional health risks for patients. Localization solutions for healthcare may help to reduce these significantly. This paper provides an overview on localization for Healthcare. It starts with an overview of applicable technologies for both indoor and outdoor localization that may be applied in healthcare logistics solutions. The next section describes various aspects that needs to be considered for an end-to-end localization solution. It is followed by a section on use-cases for healthcare with different operational requirements that may deploy technologies and methods as presented. The final section is on building a use-case concept demonstrator taking into account the technologies and considerations addressed in the previous sections. Security and privacy aspects are also considered to comply with EU healthcare regulations, especially when dealing with personal location data.