Identify that nurse!

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Inspiration

Back in high school, one of the team members contracted meningitis and was in the hospital for a week. During this time, he was unable to walk or take care of bodily functions for 3 days. He barely knew was coming in and out of the room and while he left with a good bill of health, he was rarely able to recall the name of the nurse that was helping him.

What it does

The project helps provide an easy way to tie a name to a face. To improve patient knowledge of providers, we created an easily implementable system using readily available, low-cost components. An ultrasonic sensor is included, which detects the passage of a person through a doorway; the passage is documented and timestamped. If the person is a provider, they can scan their RFID tag upon the device when they enter and exit. The Arduino system then communicates with a central server to document variables such as time in/out, provider name, role, and other valuable information. This information can become accessible at a central nurse’s station and can also be stored in the cloud if needed.

How we built it

For our prototype we used some very basic equipment that can be found in any STEM focused K-12 school.

We pulled hardware out of a RexQualis learning kit to implement a bare bones solution for the hardware. The website was using the REACT framework, mostly because that was part of the challenge. The middleware used to tie the hardware to the web interface was a custom piece of software implemented in python.

Our tech stack is the following: RFID tag, RC522 RFID reader, a jelly bean Arduino, some buzzers and other sensors, a cable to tie the arduino to the laptop, a MongoDB database and a REACT front end.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of challenges with hardware being finicky, teaching inexperienced team members and making sure they felt included, working with new technologies that we had no experience with, tying systems together, and making sure that we didn't try to "boil the ocean".

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is a project where we really tried to make sure that we actually completed something end to end. While we only had a short period of time to work on this, we are proud of out final product!

What we learned

We learned how to band together, listen to everyone, get buy in from all the members, and find a good way to divide up tasks in a way that is fair.

What's next for Identify that nurse!

We really just threw something together for this. Our three biggest restrictions were time, lack of hardware and truly understanding the use case. We would also like to experiment with using cameras and potentially some AI just for fun. If we had access to a camera module, we would take a series of pictures, or record video once someone is detected in the entryway. This will allow the system to document entry of non-providers, which may benefit the security of patients and allow family members of vulnerable children to keep an eye out on visitors. Additionally, image verification will ensure that even if someone takes an RFID tag that does not belong to them, a video is logged of their entry. Due to need for patient privacy, we will elect to place the camera near the doorframe, not facing into the room. For the purpose of patient privacy, and because of hardware limitations, we do not anticipate including audio recording.