The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is drastically changing our world by making everyday objects an integral part of the Internet. This transformation is increasingly being adopted in the healthcare sector, where Smart Hospitals are now relying on IoT technologies to track staff, patients, devices, and equipment, both within a hospital and beyond. This paradigm opens the door to new innovations for creating novel types of interactions among objects, services, and people in smarter ways to enhance the quality of patient services and the efficient utilisation of resources. However, the realisation of real-time IoT applications in healthcare and, ultimately, the development of Smart Hospitals are constrained by their current Cloud-based computing environment. Edge computing emerged as a new computing model that harnesses edge-based resources alongside Clouds for real-time IoT applications. It helps to capitalise on the potential economic impact of the IoT paradigm of $11 trillion per year, with a trillion IoT devices deployed by 2025 to sense, manage and monitor the hospital systems in real-time. This vision paper proposes new algorithms and software systems to tackle important challenges in Edge computing-enabled Smart Hospitals, including how to manage and execute diverse real-time IoT applications and how to meet their diverse and strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in hospital settings. The vision we outline can help tackle timely challenges that hospitals increasingly face.

翻译：物联网（IoT）范式正通过使日常物品成为互联网不可或缺的组成部分，深刻改变着我们的世界。这一变革正日益被医疗行业所采纳，智慧医院如今依赖物联网技术来追踪医院内外的员工、患者、设备及器械。该范式为以更智能的方式创建物品、服务与人之间新型交互打开了创新之门，从而提升患者服务质量与资源利用效率。然而，医疗领域实时物联网应用的实现，以及最终智慧医院的发展，均受限于当前基于云的计算环境。边缘计算作为一种新型计算模式应运而生，它利用边缘资源与云协同支持实时物联网应用，有助于发挥物联网范式每年11万亿美元潜在经济影响——预计到2025年，将有万亿台物联网设备部署用于实时感知、管理和监控医院系统。本愿景论文提出了新型算法与软件系统，以应对边缘计算赋能智慧医院中的关键挑战，包括如何管理与执行多样化实时物联网应用，以及如何在医院场景中满足其严格且多样的服务质量（QoS）要求。我们所勾勒的愿景有助于应对医院日益面临的紧迫挑战。