Wireless applications for hospital epidemiology

Nosocomial (i.e., hospital-acquired) infections are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and throughout the world. Therefore, understanding, mediating, and limiting contagious infections are important problems, even in clinical settings. Contact networks of healthcare workers and patients provides a vehicle for modeling the spread of infection, enabling analytical and simulation-based studies. The contact network models are based on geographic maps of hospitals and records of social contact between health care workers and patients. Wireless technology can help in both, geolocating healthcare workers and patients in a hospital and in capturing a record of physical proximity among these agents. As a step towards this goal we have implemented a low-cost wireless system to instrument hand-hygiene events; this system can track the use of hand hygiene dispensers before healthcare workers enter or exit patient rooms.