RFID in eHealth systems: applications, challenges, and perspectives

The radio frequency identification (RFID) technology promises to leverage eHealth systems. Highly pervasive RFID enables remote identification, tracking, and localization of the medical staff, patients, drugs, and equipment thus increasing safety, optimizing in real-time management, and providing support for new ambient-intelligent services. This article presents the potential and challenges on the use of RFID in healthcare. First, we state the required RFID infrastructure and its impact on patient life cycle. Then, based on this description, we identify and discuss not only the issues of large deployments, such as privacy, localization, and interference with medical devices, but also middleware systems to integrate this technology within multimedia and body area networks. Finally, we picture the future RFID-equipped hospital room, where RFID is the basis of the eHealth system.

[1]  Craig W. Thompson,et al.  Architecting RFID Middleware , 2006, IEEE Internet Computing.

[2]  Julien Bringer,et al.  Efficient zero-knowledge identification schemes which respect privacy , 2009, ASIACCS '09.

[3]  Juha Virtanen,et al.  Implantable Electronics , 2008, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[4]  Dong Wang,et al.  Design an OSGi Extension Service for Mobile RFID Applications , 2007 .

[5]  Sherali Zeadally,et al.  RFID Infrastructure Design: A Case Study of Two Australian RFID Projects , 2009, IEEE Internet Computing.

[6]  Yanghee Choi,et al.  SARIF: A novel framework for integrating wireless sensor and RFID networks , 2007, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[7]  Samuel C. Yang,et al.  Leveraging RFID in hospitals: Patient life cycle and mobility perspectives , 2007, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[8]  Roy Want,et al.  An introduction to RFID technology , 2006, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[9]  Yang Xiao,et al.  Security and privacy in RFID and applications in telemedicine , 2006, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[10]  Ari Juels,et al.  RFID security and privacy: a research survey , 2006, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[11]  Jakob E. Bardram,et al.  Applications of context-aware computing in hospital work: examples and design principles , 2004, SAC '04.

[12]  Jitender S. Deogun,et al.  Radio Frequency Identification Applications in Smart Hospitals , 2007, Twentieth IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS'07).

[13]  M. Bouet,et al.  RFID tags: Positioning principles and localization techniques , 2008, 2008 1st IFIP Wireless Days.

[14]  Ying Huang,et al.  Automatic Recommendation of Quality Requirements for Software Services , 2007 .

[15]  Hai Liu,et al.  Taxonomy and Challenges of the Integration of RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, IEEE Network.

[16]  R. Van der Togt,et al.  Electromagnetic interference from radio frequency identification inducing potentially hazardous incidents in critical care medical equipment. , 2008, JAMA.

[17]  Dominique Guinard,et al.  Building a Smart Hospital using RFID Technologies , 2006, ECEH.