SmartSpaghetti: Use of smart devices to solve health care problems

Mobile devices such as smartphones have a number of sensors that can be exploited to solve a number of problems related to health care delivery. In this paper we use accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass sensors on smart-phones to solve a location tracking problem common to many emergency departments. An emergency department typically has unique characteristics including not being friendly to be visually surveyed, since the layout consists of many isolated islands and the workstation layout is not standardized. The spaghetti diagram is a tool to help to identify areas where time can be saved by visualizing unnecessary movement of products, staff or patients. We report the development of an automated tool to create spaghetti diagrams of movements of personnel in a non-intrusive way. A preliminary prototype to produce paths showed very encouraging results. We also identify challenges and our approach to meet them.