COVID-19 Smart IoT Screening System Pilot at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network (nominated by University of Sydney)

“As we explained earlier, your work is among a diverse range of Internet of Things (IoT)-related achievements nominated for this year’s awards. They include work to manufacture connected COVID antigen testing systems, improve the safety of paramedics and healthcare patients, unlock more household use of solar energy and advance digital twin technology, among many other activities.”

University of Sydney researchers and Sydney Children’s Hospital Network have launched an Australian-first COVID-19 eGate Internet of Things integrated entry screening system at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Tested earlier this year, and with potential for expansion in the future, the e-Gate provides an efficient screening and contact tracing process before people enter hospital. 

The main idea of our smart sensing system is to improve the safety and efficiency of health screening check-points at large organisations such as hospitals. Our system aims to improve the self-awareness of COVID-19 risk factors such as commonly reported symptoms and hot spot locations in combination with contact tracing information. A smart sensing system uses Internet of Things technology and has the capability to integrate information from our COVID-19 screening app and sensors such as an automated non-contact thermal camera that detects an individual’s body surface temperature.

The system will alert people and recommend further clinically defined checks such as COVID-19 testing such as polymerase chain reaction testing if a person has self-identified risk factors such as possible COVID-19 symptoms or if the sensor determines that their current body surface temperature exceeds the pre-determined threshold. When the system detects that the surface body temperature is above a pre-determined threshold, the smart sensing system will issue a warning to alert concierge staff to conduct further clinical checks such as testing for COVID-19.  This system allows concierge staff who oversee the health screening to maintain physical distance from the health screening station and only require staff to intervene, as per their clinical policy and procedures if the alert was triggered.  

The pilot won the Health Award category in the 2021 IoT Awards.

To find more about the project and our team, click on the 'COVID-19 eGate Screening System' label and the 'Members' label

Smart Hospital Platform has implemented a complete IoT system that can be deployed in hospital scenes. On the data collection terminal, Wi-Fi and LoRa protocols are used for data uploading, including gateway settings and edge network building methods. The data will be uploaded to two cloud platforms via the MQTT protocol: AliCloud and AWS. The collected data will be simply processed by SQL and stored in the cloud database, which will be called by the subsequent visualization platform. The visualization platform provides users with the web and mobile visualization interface.

The platform currently supports multiple data upload methods such as Wi-Fi, LoRa, UWB, and BLE.

Find more about the current feature, click on the 'Smart Hospital Platform' label.

Real-time Interface

Please feel free to send your comments or suggestions to the following email address:

• jichao.leng@sydney.edu.au

Address of our laboratory:

• Link Building (j13), the University of Sydney, Darlington NSW 2008

Centre for IoT and Telecommunications