Internet of things baseline method to improve health sterilization in hospitals: An approach from electronic instrumentation and processing of steam quality

Abstract

Sterilization in hospitals is performed due to the need of attacking and killing bacteria that can be dangerous for patients when intervened with medical instrumentation. In that sense, sterilization autoclaves are used, and controlling both temperature and pressure, bacteria are killed. Nonetheless, in some cases the level of humidity in the internal atmosphere is highly relevant to guarantee the success of the process. This variable is controlled by knowing the steam quality, however, it is not monitored online, but sampling is performed a few times a year, so pertinent adjustments are carried out into the boiler when needed. This periodic maintenance does not guarantee that the process is effective. On the other hand, instruments for monitoring steam quality are expensive, and cannot be afforded by many hospitals. As a result, a cheaper determination of steam quality is carried out by using chemical instruments like test tubes, adding critical errors in the measurements. In this paper a cost-effective measuring and processing method by implementing Internet of Things — IoT-techniques is proposed, based on strangulation calorimeter. All the calculations are performed in a Single Board Computer which is connected to an IoT platform for logging data, supervise in pseudo real time and use statistical tools to inference or predict. As a result, the IoT node can achieve measurement errors up to 0.25% FS, against 5.6% FS of traditional method. Furthermore, the inclusion of pseudo real time monitoring, allows maintenance staff to fix problems even in a predictive way.