SCH: INT: Connected Smart Hospitals Enabled by Visible Light Communication

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Transformation in health and medicine calls for innovation and integration of information science and engineering approaches to revolutionize healthcare delivery systems, including high-performance wireless communication and sensing technologies. Radio-frequency (RF) wireless technologies can interfere with sensitive medical equipment, hence are not universally accepted in hospitals. This research will develop and apply a visible light communication platform technology, overlaying the existing lighting infrastructure using emerging greener solid-state light-emission diode bulbs, for live tracking and efficient networking to enable smart, connected and efficient hospitals. The scope of work and contributions include developing a novel radio-frequency-free harmless light-emission diode based visible light communication platform technology to enable two-way real-time light-based tracking and networking for smart and connected hospitals, a dynamic event-based behavioral model to simulate building-user interactions in hospital settings, and an artificial intelligence enhanced algorithm to facilitate people-data-system-connected intelligent healthcare ecosystems. Success of the proposed research will transform the field of medicine and health, and achieve affordable and efficient healthcare delivery. The research outcomes will have tremendous societal and economic impacts to the nation and humanity.The goal of this four-year project is to develop and apply a transformative tracking, networking and operation technologies, using visible light communication (VLC) technology, to enable smart, connected and efficient hospitals. The technical approach will be to overlay the innovative light emission diode (LED) based VLC platform technology on the existing LED lighting infrastructure in a hospital to provide a wireless network for real-time visible light tracking and communications without using radio-frequency (RF) signals, which can interfere with sensitive medical equipment. The technical contributions include novel RF-free LED-based VLC platform technologies and system-on-a-chip solutions to enable two-way real-time visible light tracking and networking for smart and connected hospitals, new dynamic event-based behavioral models to simulate building-user interactions in hospital settings, and innovative artificial intelligence enhanced algorithms to facilitate people-data-system-connected intelligent healthcare delivery ecosystems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.