Área de Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones, Universidad de Oviedo, 33203 Gijón (Asturias), Spain.
Faculty of Computer Science, Hochschule Mannheim, 68163 Mannheim, Germany.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Aug 13;18(8):2663. doi: 10.3390/s18082663.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) has become a key technology in the logistics and management industry, thanks to distinctive features such as the low cost of RFID tags, and the easiness of the RFID tags' deployment and integration within the items to be tracked. In consequence, RFID plays a fundamental role in the so-called digital factory or 4.0 Industry, aiming to increase the level of automatization of industrial processes. In addition, RFID has also been found to be of great help in improving the tracking of patients, medicines, and medical assets in hospitals, where the digitalization of these operations improves their efficiency and safety. This contribution reviews the state-of-the-art of RFID for e-Health applications, describing the contributions to improve medical services and discussing the limitations. In particular, it has been found that a lot of effort has been put into software development, but in most of the cases a detailed study of the physical layer (that is, the characterization of the RFID signals within the area where the system is deployed) is not properly conducted. This contribution describes a basic RFID system for tracking and managing assets in hospitals, aiming to provide additional details about implementation aspects that must be considered to ensure proper functionality of the system. Although the scope of the RFID system described in this contribution is restricted to a small area of the hospital, the architecture is fully scalable to cover the needs of the different medical services in the hospital. Ultra high-frequency (UHF) RFID technology is selected over the most extended near-field communication (NFC) and high-frequency (HF) RFID technology to minimize hardware infrastructure. In particular, UHF RFID also makes the coverage/reading area conformation easier by using different kinds of antennas. Information is stored in a database, which is accessed from end-user mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) where the position and status of the assets to be tracked are displayed.
射频识别 (RFID) 已成为物流和管理行业的关键技术，这要归功于 RFID 标签的低成本和易于在被跟踪物品中部署和集成等独特特点。因此，RFID 在所谓的数字化工厂或 4.0 工业中发挥着重要作用，旨在提高工业流程的自动化水平。此外，RFID 还被发现对改善医院中患者、药品和医疗资产的跟踪非常有帮助，这些操作的数字化提高了它们的效率和安全性。本贡献回顾了用于电子健康应用的 RFID 的最新技术，描述了改进医疗服务的贡献，并讨论了其局限性。特别是，人们发现大量的精力都投入到了软件开发中，但在大多数情况下，并没有对物理层（即系统部署区域内的 RFID 信号的特性）进行详细研究。本贡献描述了一个用于跟踪和管理医院资产的基本 RFID 系统，旨在提供有关实施方面的更多详细信息，这些信息必须被考虑以确保系统的正常功能。虽然本贡献中描述的 RFID 系统的范围仅限于医院的一个小区域，但该架构完全可扩展以满足医院不同医疗服务的需求。选择超高频 (UHF) RFID 技术而不是最广泛的近场通信 (NFC) 和高频 (HF) RFID 技术，是为了最小化硬件基础设施。特别是，UHF RFID 还通过使用不同种类的天线来更容易地形成覆盖/读取区域。信息存储在数据库中，数据库可以从最终用户的移动设备（平板电脑、智能手机）访问，在这些设备中显示要跟踪的资产的位置和状态。
