RFID-based Direction Finding Signage System (DFSS) for Healthcare Facilities

As RFID technology matures, it has huge potential for numerous applications in disparate fields of study. Due to the potential benefit and transformational technology that RFID promises, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) is dedicated to adopting passive RFID technology (United States Department of Defense suppliers’ passive RFID Information guide version 10.0, 2008). RFID has potential benefits for supply chain, inventory management, asset tracking and improved labor management and productivity within an organization. Therefore, we can see top retailers like WAL-MART adopting the technology to harvest its full potential. Likewise, Technology giants such as HP, IBM, Intel and Sun have considerable efforts and plans ahead for adoption. There have been many considerable efforts by the research community in adopting RFID in different fields of study. Healthcare applications using RFID are of primary interest as well. Although our application can be thought of as generic, we point out that we can improve healthcare quality by reducing patient wait-time and providing better patient care. Our research deals with an application based on RFID technology. We focus on designing a system using cost-effective devices so that mature applications can be built using the existing technology. We propose an application titled “Direction Finding Signage System (DFSS)”. A DFSS is a system that directs a person to a desired destination in an unfamiliar environment. The need for such a system arises when people need directions to locate a particular destination within a building. We further strengthen our idea by taking an example of a hospital environment, where emergency services are provided 24 hours a day and the volume of emergency patients is huge in number. Such a situation would result in a long waiting time for patients to discover their destinations of interest. We propose an efficient RFID application with RFID tags, readers and display devices that can visually help patients take the shortest route to their destinations. This would help them save their precious time and help them get the desired medication and care at the right time without wait-time hassles. Furthermore, the application can help a hospital’s security team be destination-aware of the patients or users in case of an accident or an emergency. This application is written in a .NET environment in C# for Windows platform. The choice of the software is solely on the basis of simplicity of the Application Programming Interface (API) provided. Source: Sustainable Radio Frequency Identification Solutions, Book edited by: Cristina Turcu, ISBN 978-953-7619-74-9, pp. 356, February 2010, INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM