IMPROVED PATIENT/NURSE CALL SYSTEM

摘要

The invention relates to a patient/nurse call system for a hospital comprising: a plurality of transmitters, each transmitter adapted to periodically transmit a pulse-coded infrared signal; a plurality of patient stations, each patient station being located in a patient room in the hospital and including a receiver to receive and validate a pulse-coded infrared signal from any of the transmitters and generate a corresponding transmitters identification signal; a signal processor operatively connected to the patient stations to receive each of the transmitter identification signals and to generate a signal pair comprising the transmitter identification signal and a respective location identification signal, the location identification signal being representative of the location of the patient station which received the transmitter identification signal; a master station operatively connected to the signal processor and adapted to receive and store the signal pairs in a memory so that at any time the signal pairs can be retrieved from memory to determine the locations of the transmitter; and a recorder operatively connected to the master station for generating reports on the locations of the transmitters over an extended period of time, whereby the master station continues to store each transmitter at a location which corresponds to the last received and validated pulse-coded signals from that transmitter, until a subsequent pulse-coded signal from that transmitter is received and validated at a different patient station.