MedRoute

Inspiration

Before every surgery, nurses gather dozens of supplies and medications from storerooms. Finding each item takes time away from treatment, and a missed or wrong item can delay a procedure. We wanted a tool that gets nurses through the storeroom faster and makes sure nothing is missed.

What it does

MedRoute is a smart picking cart for surgical prep.

Procedure queue: Nurses work through a list of upcoming procedures. For each one, the app turns its supply list into the fastest route through the storeroom.
E-paper guidance: A display on the cart shows the next item, its location (aisle and shelf), and which way to go.
Barcode verification: Scanning an item checks it off and moves to the next one. A wrong scan sounds a buzzer.
STAT procedures: A STAT procedure goes straight to the top of the priority list, so its supplies are gathered next.
Emergency items: Emergency items go to every nurse's cart and are cleared from all carts once one nurse checks them off.

How we built it

Raspberry Pi 5 runs the routing logic and drives a Waveshare 3.97" e-Paper HAT+ (G) (4-color, 800×480).
A barcode scanner and buzzer confirm each pick.
The storeroom is modeled as a graph $G = (V, E)$, where each vertex is a shelf location and each edge weight $w(u, v)$ is the walking distance between two locations. For each procedure, we look for the visiting order $\pi$ of its required items that minimizes total distance.

Challenges we ran into

Hardware limits: We could only use parts from the hackathon's hardware lab, so we had to design around the components that were available.
E-paper refresh time: E-paper redraws slowly, so we kept each screen simple and updated it only when the next item changed.
Prioritizing procedures: We had to decide how STAT procedures and emergency items fit into a nurse's queue without confusing them.