A software solution for ALS patients to automate hospital rooms by combining BIM, Virtual Reality and IoT

This thesis is based on the application of BIM (building Information Modeling), Virtual Reality and Cloud technologies to the case study of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) patients. ALS is a rare pathology with an incidence of 2-3 cases every 100.000 individuals, but the trend is destined to rise with the increasing of population average age. This disease has a strong social impact and degrades personal freedom: during the pathology path, the mind functions of the patients rest intact, while witness a continuous decline of voluntary muscles control. The aim of the work is the design and the implementation of a software system that can allow ALS patients to regain autonomy. Nowadays, exist the eye tracking systems that enable patients to build words just by look over letters, using a virtual keyboard, and with the integrated software can reproduce the composed word. However, the problem of loss of autonomy is still not solved. The proposed framework starts from the BIM model of the hospital structure, that has been made available by “Drawing To The Future” Group, main partner of this thesis project . From this total model has been extracted the required room model, manipulated and loaded during software execution, using a runtime approach. Thanks to an external eye gaze system, based on 3 PIR cameras, eye movements are tracked and traduced into actions within the virtual reality environment. This approach has been extended by the possibility of controlling real actuators and read measurements from environmental sensors sited in the room. Thanks to the development of this IoT system ,based on microservices approach, the interface between Man, Computer and external environment has been realized. To make software management and control available to the medical team, a cloud-based website has been developed that, by dividing the actors according to their role (doctor, nurse or technician), allows also the management of medical information related to various patients.