A Queue Management System for a Hospital: A Wearable Q

Abstract

One main problem of health services in hospitals is that patients have to wait in front of the monitor displaying the service queue. They cannot go elsewhere. Although, at present, queue applications have been developed on smartphones, these solutions are not applicable for everyone. Therefore, the main objectives of this research are to design and to develop a queuing system which can notify the queue via a wireless network. Patients can carry or wear the queue device in order that they can do other activities during waiting for the service queue. The developed system consisted of 3 parts: Part 1 is wearable queue devices designed in the form of a wristband and they had to be cheap, small and easily portable. The Node MCU was used for wireless connection to receive the queue number and to show the queue status through LEDs and sound. Part 2 was the queue calling push button. When it was pressed, the signal was sent to the third part, i.e., the queue management controller for processing and sending the queue information to the wearable queue devices. The experimental results showed that the developed queue management system can be implemented successfully as designed for both simulation and real situations at the medical service center, Mahasarakham University. Therefore, it can facilitate the patients to do other activities during queue waiting.