DMC and Linx collaborated to develop a wall-mounted device for a healthcare setting. The device is an important part of hospital procedures and is used by the staff on a daily basis.

Linx is an innovative design firm with offices in Chicago, Hong Kong, and China. Linx focused on the PCB layout and the device’s fabrication, including the mechanical design, aesthetic, and user interface. DMC focused on the internal technology, mobile application, and reporting services. DMC and Linx collaborated on a monitoring dashboard integration and configuration.

The hospital needed to be able to monitor usage of the devices. The hospital would use this data to examine how device placement and associated environmental behavior drivers affects usage rates by installing the devices in approved locations. The experiment design required that the device be able to collect data and send it to the cloud.

A small circuit board inside the device collects usage data. Each time the device is used, a time stamp and number of interactions is recorded.

Getting the new device onto the hospital’s wireless network would have been difficult, so an alternative connectivity solution for uploading data to the cloud was needed. We incorporated data collection into the hospital’s regular device maintenance schedules by developing a small Bluetooth module inside the device. When staff enter the room to service the devices, their phone connects with the device over Bluetooth and sends this data to the cloud.

The data is sent to a web service built with ASP.NET. This web service then stores the data in SQL Server. Usage information can then be accessed, visualized, and analyzed through a custom Power BI dashboard. Both the web service and the database are hosted in Microsoft Azure.

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