Hospital infrastructures are always in evidence in periods of crisis, such as natural disasters or pandemic events, under stress. The recent COVID-19 pandemic exposed several inefficiencies in hospital systems over a relatively long period. Among these inefficiencies are human factors, such as how to manage staff during periods of high demand, and technical factors, including the management of Portable Medical Devices (PMD), such as mechanical ventilators, capnography monitors, infusion pumps, or pulse oximeters. These devices, which are vital for monitoring patients or performing different procedures, were found to have a high turnover during high-demand, resulting in inefficiencies and more pressure on medical teams. Thus, the work PMD-Track evaluates in detail two popular indoor tracking approaches concerning their accuracy, placement of beacons, and economic impacts. The key novelty of PMD-Track relies on using smartphones provided to hospital employees, replacing typical stationary gateways spread across a hospital, functioning as mobile gateways with a front-end that assists staff in locating PMDs. As employees approach tagged PMDs, their smartphone automatically updates the location of spotted PMDs in real-time, providing room-level localization data with up to 83% accuracy for fingerprinting and 35% for multilateration. In addition, fingerprinting is 45% cheaper than multilateration over the course of five years. Practical experiments were evaluated based on two locations in Z\"urich, Switzerland.

翻译：医院基础设施在危机时期（如自然灾害或大流行病）常面临巨大压力。近期COVID-19疫情在相对长的时间内暴露了医院系统的多项低效问题。这些低效因素包括人员管理（如高需求时期的人力调配）和技术因素（如便携式医疗设备PMD的管理），例如呼吸机、二氧化碳监测仪、输液泵或脉搏血氧仪。这些用于患者监测或执行不同手术的关键设备在高需求期间被发现有高流转率，导致效率低下并增加医疗团队压力。因此，PMD-Track工作详细评估了两种主流室内定位方法的精度、信标布局及经济影响。PMD-Track的核心创新在于利用提供给医院员工的智能手机，替代传统分布在医院各处的固定网关，作为带有前端界面的移动网关，辅助员工定位PMD。当员工接近贴有标签的PMD时，其智能手机实时自动更新已发现设备的位置，提供基于房间级的定位数据，其中指纹定位精度达83%，多点定位精度为35%。此外，五年周期内指纹定位成本比多点定位低45%。实际实验基于瑞士苏黎世的两个地点进行评估。