Building a smart hospital using RFID technologies

Abstract

Technologies of identification by radio frequencies (RFID) experience a fast development and healthcare is predicted to be one of its major growth areas. After briefly introducing the common terminology of the RFID field and its current standards, this paper describes how this emerging technology can be used to build a smart hospital. Indeed, used in combination with mobile devices in eHealth applications, RFID helps optimizing business processes in healthcare and improve patient safety. The second part of this article shows how to use an assets tracking application, called the RFIDLocator, to improve the quality of the hospital services. We developed the RFIDLocator to support the high requirements for scalability and reliability one can expect for such an application. An overview of its distributed software architecture is given. A short cookbook presents the required steps for its configuration to the concrete case of the hospital. Some critical remarks about RFID technology, the important questions it raises and the barriers it has to overcome to be fully integrated in eHealth applications conclude this paper.