A Healthcare Laundry Management System using RFID System

Abstract

This paper presented the use of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) for laundry management system in healthcare. The laundry management system is designed to detect, count, record and report the laundry process from washing, drying, ironing, folding, and packaging. The laundry management system is consisted of the waterproof RFID laundry tags, RFID reader and the data recording system which was build using Visual Basic and Microsoft Access software. In this project, the users will be able to monitor the process of the hospital’s linen which includes the pillowcases, bedsheets, towels, and other hospital linens. The advantage of using this laundry management can reduce the human error of missed count the items and also to ensure smooth laundry item cleaning process to be executed. The database recording system allows the user to monitor the number of in and out item processed at the laundry. As the items passed though the RFID reader, they will be automatically detected by its unique ID of each item. The database recoding system will display out the number of RFID tag detected at one time and store it into the database. The RFID reader is placed at the entrance of different processing area. Therefore, the user will be able to monitor the status of certain linen items. From the database recording system, users will be able to check for any missing linen along the cleaning process. For the laundry operator who serve for more than one hospital, this laundry management system can help reduce the possibility for different linen from different hospital to be mixed. The database recoding system presented in this paper is able to reduce the human error, effective and systematic compared to the traditional laundry counting and recording system. This laundry management system also can be used for hotels laundry management for the linen that can be tagged to prevent the loss of items such as towels, blanket, and curtains.