Online evaluation of the quality of the operating rooms and intensive care units environment by means of distributed measuring networks

Monitoring environmental parameters of high-risk departments, such as Operating Rooms or Intensive Care Units, is essential to assure adequate working conditions for medical personnel to avoid possible causes of hazard to physicians and patients. Some national and international regulations have been issued to individuate the ranges of variation for most relevant ambient parameters, such as temperature, relative humidity, air speed, and so forth. Although these parameters are generally measured during acceptance tests, there is an objective difficulty in verifying their values during common hospital activities (ie, when the risk for disease is higher). To this aim, a specific measuring network has been designed and implemented in a radiologic laboratory for cardiac catheterization as a preliminary application. The distributed measuring system is based on a TCP/IP protocol and an Ethernet network equipped with Fieldpoint devices by National Instruments. In a preliminary approach it was decided to monitor temperature and relative humidity distribution in several points of the room, together with the activation of the medical instrumentation. The experimental evaluation of the distributed measuring network was then conducted extensively for 30 consecutive days and results proved applicability, effectiveness, and reliability of the system developed even when the Ethernet network is shared with other hospital applications.