Exploiting underused service capacity in the NHS Estate with IoT Sensors

"Vision: Greater proportion of NHS£1 spent on direct patient care by enabling the current NHS estate to be used more intensively thereby reducing the requirement for new health buildings.

Proposed Solution: LoRaWAN Edge Computing IoT sensor delivering accurate data about the use patterns, service capacity and environment of NHS buildings.

The NHS is suffering from a perceived shortage of quality health accommodation, even though it spends £30bn per annum on property and facilities-related services. The best available information from expensive consultant-led studies indicates building utilisation as low as 40%. In reality, the health system has high quality space in abundance, but it is simply undiscovered, unallocated and under-utilised. The NHS needs to spend more money on direct patient care and can no longer afford to continue to build new buildings to meet increasing demands. This means it needs to understand the capacity of its estate and ensure that new services are planned to maximise the uptake of that capacity. It is recognised that the only way to provide the data needed is through using sensors.

We have developed an innovative prototype IoT sensor that provides NHS Estate Managers and Health Service Planners with real time data on specialised health space availability, moveable assets position, building environment and service delivery. Given the sensitive nature of health buildings, we have developed an edge computing solution that looks at a space and counts people visible. To protect privacy and ensure security, all data processing is done on the sensor with the data sent via LoRaWAN backhaul. The same sensor can also track moveable assets, such as equipment and beds."