Detection and alert of unauthorized equipments in hospital rooms by electric current supervision

Authors

  • Marcelo Trindade Rebonatto Universidade de Passo Fundo
  • Oneide Jorge Pereira da Paixão Hospital São Vicente de Paulo - HSVP
  • Luiz Eduardo Schardong Spalding Hospital São Vicente de Paulo - HSVP

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5335/rbca.v15i2.13920

Keywords:

electrical hazard, fire protection, hospital, safety

Abstract

In periods of intense cold, patients or their families make use of unauthorized electric heaters that overload to hospital electrical installations and thus increase the risks to those installations, which can cause circuit breakers to turn off and to overheat sockets, cables and connectors, increasing the risk of fire and permanent damage to the physical structure of the hospital. This article presents a non-invasive monitoring method, aiming to detect current variations related to the consumption of electric heaters and inform when they are turned on. The system uses a Texas Instruments TM4C1294XL board that captures and sends samples of this current via an Ethernet interface to a computer, on which a program in Python language classifies occurrences into events, stores them in a database and then provides a web interface in order to alert those responsible to act on risk minimization measures. In addition, limits are established for phase and leakage currents so that you can be informed when they present a risk to the installation or the patient. Our tests confirmed the efficiency of monitoring in detecting the connection of electric heaters even in conjunction with other loads in the circuit, showing that it is possible to supervise the electrical network in a non-invasive way and detect the connection of unwanted/not allowed appliences.

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Author Biography

  • Marcelo Trindade Rebonatto, Universidade de Passo Fundo
    Graduado em Ciência da Computação pela UPF, mestrado em Ciência da Computação na UFRGS na linha de pesquisa em Processamento Paralelo e Distribuído e Doutorado em Ciência da Computação pela PUCRS na área de Computação Embarcada.

Published

2023-07-27

Issue

Section

Original Paper

How to Cite

[1]
2023. Detection and alert of unauthorized equipments in hospital rooms by electric current supervision. Brazilian Journal of Applied Computing. 15, 2 (Jul. 2023), 73–87. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5335/rbca.v15i2.13920.