Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring

Introduction

Hand hygiene is important everywhere, whether it's in healthcare, the office, a restaurant, or a shopping center. Most pathogens are transmitted by the hands. Thorough hand washing is therefore the most effective protection against the spread of infections. The awareness of the importance of thorough hand hygiene has grown with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To keep up and further raise this awareness regarding hand hygiene compliance and for individual behavior change and performance optimization, this project aims to develop a gamification solution that collects data and provides real-time feedback accurately in a fun and engaging way. Especially in health care, food processing or any business with close customer contact this hand hygiene compliance monitoring can be used to reveal deficits in compliance and the need for training.

Hand cleaning stations (e.g., sanitizer dispensers) can be equipped with sensors to detect and record product usage (e.g., monitor dispenser fill level). Hand cleaning stations and critical spots (e.g., patient bed in a hospital, food processing workplace etc.) can be equipped with a RFID reader or BT scanner to identify individuals (e.g., staff wearing an RFID badge) and check if hand cleaning has been performed in an adequate way (e.g., before & after patient care, before contact to food etc.).

The M5Stack Core2 ESP32 can be used as controlling device for sensors and readers, to collect the regarding data and to transmit to AWS IoT for further processing e.g., with AWS IoT Analytics and Amazon QuickSight. The Core2’s display & speaker can be used to provide immediate feedback to the user.

Idea

The idea to realize this project was, to implement a application on the M5Stack Core2, which detects the proximity of BLE beacon tags worn by personal (e.g. with a badge, name tag, key card holder etc.) and reports this to a cloud application.

The cloud application manages the hygiene policy as a set of rules describing which actions has to be performed in sequence. E.g., the sanitizer dispenser at the entrance door of patient's room has to visited/used before attending the patient in his bed.

Work in Progress

This project is still work in progress...

For more details please refer to the GitHub repository Hand-Hygiene-Compliance-Monitoring.