RFID Technology towards Smart Hospitals

Most hospitals handle their assets, employees, patients and records using a paperbased procedure. Unfortunately, a paper-based procedure might hinder patient service time. Moreover, it increases hospital medical errors. The concept of smart hospitals has been adopted to improve patient care, optimize workflows, and help avoid severe mistakes (e.g. patient misidentification, blood transfusion errors and mismedication). Moreover, it leads to a dramatic reduction in operation costs. This approach requires combining hospital information systems with communication technologies. The project detailed in this thesis focuses on implementing RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology in healthcare. There are two objectives for this implementation: firstly, to improve the quality of hospital services and, secondly, to better manage hospital assets, e.g. the pulse oximeter and electrocardiograph (ECG). This will speed up the workflow and reduce the search time for misplaced important medical devices. The proposed system will be applied to a health facility to investigate the effect of implementing the RFID system on medical equipment. Additionally, this project will introduce a guideline set of benchmarks to characterize UHF GEN 2 passive RFID tags