BLE-IoT Based Medical Device Tracker: A Review

Abstract

The increasing adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed healthcare by enabling real-time monitoring, intelligent decision-making, and improved hospital operations. Among its applications, IoT-based medical device tracking has emerged as an effective solution for addressing challenges related to equipment misplacement, delayed retrieval, inefficient asset utilization, and increased workload among biomedical personnel. The review examines the current state of IoT-based medical device tracking systems, with a particular focus on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, its benefits, implementation challenges, and future research directions. The review found that BLE is widely adopted for indoor medical asset tracking because of its low power consumption, cost-effectiveness, ease of deployment, and compatibility with existing healthcare infrastructures. Furthermore, integrating BLE with advanced localization techniques such as fingerprinting, Kalman filtering, and machine learning significantly improves tracking accuracy, reliability, and real-time asset visibility. Despite these advantages, several challenges remain, including signal instability, interoperability, cybersecurity, scalability, and infrastructure requirements, which continue to limit large-scale deployment in healthcare environments. The literature suggests that future medical asset tracking systems will increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence, edge computing, blockchain, and next-generation BLE technologies to enhance localization accuracy, security, and operational intelligence. Overall, the findings demonstrate that BLE-based IoT medical device tracking has strong potential to improve biomedical staff efficiency, optimize hospital asset management and support smart healthcare ecosystems.