RFID monitoring of health care routines and processes in hospital environment

Abstract

This thesis discusses radio frequency identications (RFID) and its applications in hospital environment. RFID technology opens up possibilities to construct novel intelligent systems for monitoring and tracking purposes. Tracking systems can collect data on daily processes and care routines and this information can be used both for quality control and for improving care processes and logistics.

The work consists of a literature review and an applied systems design. The literature review looks into the basics, theory and applications of RFID technology today. Various proposals of RFID use in health care are reviewed and evaluated. Central applications are quality control and positioning, in order to avoid human mistakes using RFID cross-checking and for improving the utilisation rate and minimising waste of equipment, respectively.

As an application of RFID process control the thesis considers monitoring of hand hygiene. Hand hygiene is a single most important counter-measure for nosocomial infections. However, studies have shown that there is much to improve in the compliance with hand hygiene recommendation. For this purpose we suggest a monitoring system based on personal identication that may signicantly improve the rate of compliance. We consider technical, privacy and ethical issues that are associated with personal identication at work.