Patients tracking and identifying inside hospital: A multilayer method to plan an RFId solution

Abstract

This paper shows a method to get a patient tracking RFId solution, basing on a multilayer planning architecture. This approach is thought to guarantee that the found technical solution is as much as possible coherent to the very initial idea. Project aims, functional requirements and technical constraints are defined in order to arrive to an active RFId solution to track and identify patients inside a hospital. The article also deals with economical issues and physical design aspects. In this work it's also defined a three phases process for patient tracking, that could serve as a guideline for different technical solutions to the same problem.

Careggi Smart hospital: A mobile app for patients, citizens and healthcare staff

“…In the future it will be the starting point for many specialized clinical and non clinical applications, such as chronic care management [3,4], telemedicine application [5,6,7], patients tracking [8,9,10], technology management [11] and drugs smart administration [12,13].…”

Spatial-frequency data acquisition using rotational invariant pattern matching in smart environments

“…This system has been proven to be highly accurate; however, its main weakness is the need for an inhabitant to wear a transceiver vest in most implementations. A similar drawback is also true for both radio frequency identification-based methods [12,13] and Bluetooth-enabled positioning approaches [14]. Even within an ultrasound system that does not require such a vest [15], it has yet to be shown how such ultrasonic approaches have the ability to discriminate between a moving person and the movement of an inanimate object (e.g.…”

Unveiling the Potential of RFID-Enabled Intelligent Patient Management: Results of a Delphi Study

“…Bar coding, another AIDC technology, can be used to capture and manage patient-related medication information, track patient laboratory and radiology results, and track and trace blood bags [11]. Recently, however, RFID technology has emerged as a new wave of IT that may radically transform the healthcare sector [9,19] by allowing better patient identification [20], providing a better way of tracking and tracing the identity of patients within healthcare facilities [21], and reducing errors in patient care [22], as well as enabling better management of the various steps in the blood transfusion process [23], innovative management of patients with chronic conditions [16,24], a better way of checking, tracking, and tracing pharmaceutical products origin, and the management of incident audit trail between medical equipment and healthcare staff [25]. Indeed, RFID technology offers greater capabilities when compared to traditional AIDC (e.g., bar coding); this technology does not need line of sight and possesses unique item-level identification, multiple tag item reading, better data storage capability, and data read-and-write capabilities.…”