Smartening hospital electrical distribution for enhancing resilience

Abstract

Power is a crucial element in hospitals whether it’s within the intensive care units, surgical bays, or medical scanning rooms. Natural disasters and terrorist attacks remind us how dependent we are on electricity and how fragile the system can be. The paper deals with the resilience of hospitals’ electricity distribution system. In particular, a supervising platform is illustrated that can be superimposed to the main components of the power system in order to promptly collect and centralize anomalies or malfunctioning or outages. To this aim, an Internet of Things (IoT) based solution has been implemented that allows equipping at low cost the various electrical components in the distribution MV/LV substations of the hospital’s power system. The solution implements a platform based on Raspberry Pi3.