Feasibility study of convenient automatic identification system of medical articles using LF-band RFID in hospital

The number of medical accidents has recently been increasing in patient environments in Japan. Most of these accidents are ascribed to errors by nurses. Among these, however, are cases that could have been prevented by appropriate management of medical articles. In the patient environment, the patient is placed at the center, and medical articles are in a dependency relation to the patient. An accident may arise if such a dependency is not fulfilled. This paper proposes the use of low-frequency-band RFID tags in order to monitor the patient environment. In the proposed method, tags are attached to the patient and all related medical articles. By monitoring the tags at any time by wireless communications, mistaken inclusion of articles related to other patients can be avoided. In this system, tags are automatically identified, which avoids placing an extra burden on the nurses and other medical professionals. In this study, the identification performance of RFID tags is improved and the feasibility of their use as a practical system is verified by an experiment in an environment simulating an actual site.