Intelligent Asset Management in the Smart Hospital

Abstract

In recent years, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has made significant progress and healthcare is predicted to be one of its major growth areas. In particular, the optimisation of asset management within hospitals in order to cut back expenditures and improve patient care appears to be an area of significant potential for the deployment of this emergent technology. The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how RFID as a pervasive technology can be applied to a healthcare environment such as a hospital, for the effective tracking and management of RFID-tagged hospital assets. To reach our goal, we implement an RFID Simulator application, wherein diverse hospital RFID scenarios involving tagged assets can be recreated. On simulation of these scenarios, the interaction between simulated RFID readers and tagged assets generates in real-time a stream of RFID events which following aggregation, can be stored in a central database for consumption by back-end application prototypes. Three scenarios covering major RFID hospital use cases are recreated. A real-time tracking scenario is used to simulate the movement of high-value tagged assets in a reader-networked hospital floor. RFID data generated from this scenario is used by back-end software to generate reports on asset location, asset utilisation, asset inventory and to monitor out-of-range assets. Another scenario is created to simulate the RFID-assisted monitoring of laboratory sample transit from the point of sample collection to the laboratory, with a back-end application monitoring and reporting discrepancies between the number of samples collected and the actual number arriving at the laboratory. The third scenario is created to simulate the use of RFID technology to replace manual surgical sponge counts before and after a surgical procedure. Our implementation demonstrates how well-managed RFID data can be exploited to extract the high-value information required for effective pervasive asset monitoring and management in a hospital setting.