Ekahau develops system to monitor hand hygiene
Aims to minimise hospital acquired infections
Ekahau, a US developer of Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), has developed a Wi-Fi Hand Hygiene Monitoring solution that automatically monitors hand hygiene of staff in healthcare facilities to prevent the spread of hospital acquired infections and other transmittable diseases.
The system is currently undergoing field testing and will be available in the second quarter of 2011.
Ekahau RTLS tracks the location of staff and their interactions with patients and measures how often they wash their hands. The Ekahau RTLS system can operate over a hospital's Wi-Fi network, linking with GOJO Industries’ SmartLink hand dispensers and providing access to GOJO’s skincare products under the Purell and Provon brands.
The same Ekahau RTLS system, once installed, can be used for staff communications, safety, workflow, patient tracking, asset tracking and environmental monitoring.
The system combines Ekahau location-enabled staff badges and beacons, which are embedded into GOJO's SmartLink dispensers throughout a hospital. The badges – which are also used for staff messaging, workflow and safety applications – enable the RTLS system to monitor staff-patient interactions, as well as when staff wash their hands, in order to calculate compliance with hospital policy.
By using the two-way communications capabilities of the Ekahau RTLS system, staff can receive reminders and status information on the text display of their badges to help improve hand hygiene compliance. To ensure full compliance, the Ekahau transmitters integrated into the dispensers are only activated when hands are sanitised, eliminating any false information from being collected.
