Hospital Authority
In public hospitals in Hong Kong, overoccupancy is a recurring problem that needs to be addressed. In the 5-year plan from 2017 to 2022, the Hospital Authority (HA) has already commenced the Smart Hospital initiative, by using Information Technology (IT) and innovations to enhance operational efficiency in hospitals. In HA's Smart Hospital blueprint, Smart Care is a key component that adopts the latest technologies in patient care. In collaboration with the Hospital Authority, ASTRI will develop technologies to enable a Smart Hospital Ward to enhance the efficiency of patient care. The solutions primarily tackle the problems in monitoring patients' health and safety. Vital signs data are collected for monitoring a patient’s health and to detect problems such as cardiac arrests and apneas. Instead of being done by ward staff, wearable devices can help scale up the number of patients being monitored. Furthermore, wearable devices can also be used to help manage the safety issues, such as detecting accidents or presence at inappropriate locations. Besides IT, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics are the technologies that enable this Smart Ward initiative. It is HA’s goal to widely adopt the technologies developed among its hospitals, upon successful completion of this project.