Smart hospitals in smart cities

The Internet of Things (IoT)has contributed to the beginning of the era of Smart Cities, Smart Schools, Smart Homes and then Smart Hospitals. Smart cities are able to reduce maintenance costs by optimizing energy consumption, to improve citizens’ safety, to monitor and control municipal functions like parking, traffic, lighting, and overall satisfaction of all residents. At the same time, in this increasingly wireless and connected world, also many hospitals and healthcare facilities are connecting to Internet of Things, devices to enhance security, safety, operational efficiency and the patient and resident experience. One of the issues to be addressed is that hospitals are still not very smart. The problem is not so much the diffusion of technologies, rather then to make sure that those already present, that are almost always isolated can dialogue with those of recent development and thus create new generation of infrastructures. For example, any hospital has security systems, the evolutionary leap is to enrich all this with new platforms to create an integrated and reactive system. Another issue is also connecting the Smart City with the Smart Hospital in order to maintain the care also after the check out, to accompany the patient after the discharge from the hospital in his/her journey back home and throughout all the period of convalescence. In this sense it is very important to have a connection between IoT, Cities infrastructures and new diffused Hospitals infrastructure in the cities. The article, starting from the description of two examples of European University Smart Hospitals (Careggi Smart Hospital in Florence, Rovereto Hospitaland the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm), analyzes the potentiality of the new technologies embedded in Smart Hospital, and identifies the main strategies to connect the Smart Hospitals with the Smart Cities.