The Internet of Things and Opportunities for Pervasive Safety Monitored Health Environments

This chapter discusses the opportunities for new ubiquitous computing technologies, with concentration on the Internet of Things (IoT), to improve patient safety and quality. The authors focus on elective or planned surgical interventions, although the technology is applicable to primary and trauma care. The chapter is divided into three main sections with section 1 covering medical error issues and mechanisms, section 2 introducing Internet of Things, and section 3 discussing how IoT capabilities may address and reduce medical errors. The authors explore the existing theory of errors expounded by Reason (Reason, 2000, 1998; Leape, 1994) to identify perception-, decision-, and knowledge-based medical errors and related processes, environments, and cultural drivers causing error. The authors then introduce the technology of the Internet of Things and identify a range of capabilities from sensing, tracking, control, cooperative, and semantic reasoning. They then show how these new capabilities might be applied to reduce the errors expounded by the discussed error theories. They identify that: IoT enables augmentation of objects, which provides a massive increase in information transfer, thus improving clinician perception and support for decision-making and problem solving; IoT provides a host of additional observers and opportunities, which can shift the focus of overworked clinicians from constant monitoring to undertaking complex actions, such as decision making and care; IoT networks of sensors and actuators, through the addition of semantic and contextual rules, support decision making and facilitate automated monitoring and control of pervasive safety-monitored health environments, thus reducing clinician workload.