5. Conclusions and Future Work
In this paper, we have present a comparison of two approaches, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT), for implementing a RealTime Monitoring System of Meal Distribution Trolleys in a hospital. The performance evaluation results show that the IoT implementation yields much lower latencies than the WSN implementation, and the latency does not depend on the location of the trolley or the building size. Regarding battery life expectancy, the IoT approach yields slightly better expectancy than the WSN approach. Thus the IoT approach seems the best option for real-time surveillance of the meal distribution trolleys.
As a future work, we plan to improve the functionality and the performance of the IoT-based monitoring system. In this sense, we are dealing with two different challenges involving the implementation of our IoT-based monitoring system in more complex buildings. In particular, we are adapting the IoT monitoring system for being deployed in multiple-building hospitals (like Hospital Universitario La F´e at Valencia, Spain, or the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, UK), where the traceability of the meals path from the kitchen to the patients may include some buildings separated from each other. Also, we are improving the functionality of the App executed on the smartphone, adding an alarm system to warn the user if any of the maximum/minimum threshold temperatures are reached within the trolley cold/hot compartments, respectively. This alarm system will include a software module based on predictive analytics which will estimate the remaining time before reaching these temperature thresholds.
