IoT Smart Trolley System for Healthcare

Abstract

Technological advances in Internet of things (IoT) have brought the technology well within the reach of many small and medium enterprises as well as consumer markets in recent years. Food preparation in the healthcare industry is generally labor intensive and there are safety standards to adhere to. There is great potential in applying IoT technologies to improve food preparation and streamline the process in hospitals. In this paper, an IoT smart trolley system is proposed to automate the process of temperature tracking of food trolleys in hospitals. The system targets to reduce the time and labor needed to record temperatures of food trolleys, and improve the accuracy of the data collected, thereby resulting in cost-savings in the long run and allowing real-time monitoring of temperatures in food trolleys. Various hardware and software technologies are applied in the system, including Raspberry Pi for data collection, MQTT via Wi-Fi for data transmission, and Firebase cloud backend for data store and process, etc. After design and implementation, the IoT smart trolley system has undergone different levels of testing. The system can achieve its objective to automatically record and monitor temperatures for food trolleys with improved data accuracy and reduced time and labor.