Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 2, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 6, 2019 - Apr 3, 2019
Date Accepted: May 20, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Measuring real-time hospital restroom cleanliness using an Internet of Things Button
ABSTRACT
Background:
Restroom cleanliness is an important factor in hospital quality. Due to its dynamic process, it can be difficult to detect the presence of dirty restrooms that need to be cleaned. Using an Internet of Things (IoT) button can permit users to designate restrooms that need cleaning and in turn, allow prompt response from housekeeping to maintain real time restroom cleanliness.
Objective:
We describe the deployment of an IoT button-based notification system to measure hospital restroom cleanliness reporting system usage and qualitative feedback from housekeeping staff on IoT button use.
Methods:
We deployed an IoT button in seventeen hospital restrooms. Over a one year period, housekeeping staff received real-time notifications and responded to button presses for restroom cleaning. All button presses were recorded. We reported button usage by hospital area, time of day, and day of week, and over time. We also conducted interviews with housekeeping supervisors and staff to understand their acceptance and experience with the system.
Results:
Over one year, we received 1,920 requests to clean restrooms in our main hospital lobby and satellite buildings. The hospital lobby IoT buttons received over half (N=1055, 55%) of requests for cleaning. Most requests occurred in afternoon hours from 3PM to midnight. Requests for cleaning remained stable throughout the work week with fewer requests occurring over weekends. IoT button use was sustained throughout the study period. Interviews with housekeeping supervisors and staff demonstrated acceptance of the IoT buttons; actual use was centered around asynchronous communication between supervisors and staff in response to requests to clean restrooms.
Conclusions:
An IoT button system is a feasible method to generate on demand request for restroom cleaning that is easy to deploy and that users will consistently engage with. Data from this system have the potential to enable responsive scheduling for restroom service and anticipate periods of high restroom utilization in a hospital.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.