Medicines Identification for African Illiterate Patients Using Near Field Communication

Abstract

This paper presents the application of Near Field Communication (NFC) to the healthcare sector. Although a number of papers have been written to discuss different NFC applications in the healthcare sector, none of them address the potential challenges facing illiterate patients worldwide. According to UNESCO institute for statistics, the Sub-Saharan African region has the highest percentage of illiterate people compared to other regions in the world. NFC can be used in conjunction with other technologies, especially mobile communications which provide high data speeds at cheap rates. The proposed NFC application consists of a NFC sticker placed on the medicine container, the NFC phone with an Android application that reads the sticker ID, connects to a Medicine Information Server and retrieves relevant instructions for medicine in audio form. Some of the advantages for this solution are that the NFC stickers can be recycled. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2014.