News
Active RFID growing in use in healthcare
14 November 2007
Active RFID is a form of electronic tag that includes a power supply
to operate sensors, initiate signals and increase communication range.
It is rapidly gaining a place in healthcare, primarily for tracking
critical assets and staff. It can also enable staff to send an alarm if
they are threatened or come upon a medical emergency that they cannot
deal with alone.
Active tags with sensors — increasingly in the form of labels — are
being used to monitor whether blood, medicines, transplants and other
critical items have been overheated in transport or storage, this data
can then be used to implement better procedures.
According to Dr Peter Harrop, Chairman of IDTechEx, in the last year,
over 100 hospitals have installed real-time locating systems (RTLS), a
form of active RFID.
RTLS involve small tags that can signal their location at all times.
There is no need for an RFID reader to be nearby. They variously work at
ten metres to several kilometres and they are already widely used in
applications ranging from Club Car's golf kart production line, to
monitoring assets transported by military helicopters. However, the
applications and the technology are now moving forward at a blistering
pace.
The tags may be the size of your hand or the size of a wristwatch and
accuracy of location varies from a few centimetres to many meters.
However, RTLS is one of those technologies that is workable and
affordable at just the right time to meet a variety of urgent needs.
These vary from monitoring hospital assets — typically, 15% of their
assets are lost every year — to locating staff in an emergency when they
are being assaulted or require assistance.
Then there is the need for better traceability of personnel, whether
up a stack or down a tunnel, in oil and gas facilities, finding critical
assets in those and other industries and even tracking children on the
way home from school or when a building is evacuated.
There is much more, and that is why no one technology will satisfy
all the needs and many more technologies are coming along. For example,
BP finds Ultra Wide Band RTLS best for 3D tracking of personnel in
potentially dangerous facilities. Hospitals often prefer RTLS working
off WiFi, because it can be a little lower in cost of ownership and best
accuracy is not paramount.
IDTechEx is holding a conference on the technologies, the Active RFID
and RTLS 2007 conference, in Dallas, USA, 5-6 December.
At the conference, Time Domain will reveal the remarkable accuracy of
Ultra Wide Band (UWB) RTLS and G2 Microsystems will cover WiFi RTLS.
Hospital Corporation of America, GreenPeak (active RFID and ZigBee in
hospitals) and Sonitor, with its location systems, are among those
looking at active RFID in healthcare from both the user and the supplier
perspectives.
Healthcare professionals will also be interested in the logistics
aspects presented by the US Army, DHL and TNT; industry leader IDENTEC
Systems will cover active RFID for increasing worker safety; and
Information Mediary, responsible for the RFID-based, compliance
monitoring packs in the recent Azithromycin trial of the National
Institutes of Health, will present on semi-passive RFID for cold chain
applications.
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