RFID-based approach for monitoring patient’s health inside hospitals

Abstract

While many technologies have been adopted in hospitals for preventing adverse events that could result in patient’s injury or death, detecting the precursors at early stages is yet a common problem and is often neglected due to improper patient monitoring mechanisms. Traditional continuous patient monitoring equipment (i.e. in ICU) lack wearability, portability and cost effectiveness. In this paper we introduce RFIDTrack, a mobile monitoring solution that allows wearable, continuous observation of many patient vital signs to be used inside hospitals. RFIDTrack offers a robust distributed system that is capable of alerting medical staff (i.e. nurses or doctors) in case of early detection of adverse events. The paper presents some experimental validation results, and analysis of the proposed ideas.