| Technology
Technical options
A number of meetings with potential suppliers were held in order to establish which technologies and suppliers would best be involved in the project. The suppliers were assessed in relation to the following topics:
• Frequency;
• Available tags;
• Infrastructure;
• Price;
• Installation and maintenance.
Avonwood was eventually selected as supplier of the active technology on the basis of the above considerations. The decisive points were the immediate availability of two of the three types of tags required, experience with current temperature measurements, the capability to integrate with the existing AMC IT infrastructure and the company's references from the healthcare sector.
Standard passive UHF technology as used in the retail and pharmaceutical sectors was selected for the materials pilot. This technique is particularly suitable for the tagging of boxes, crates, wheeled containers and pallets. Specialized tags for "item level tagging", the tagging of individually packaged articles, is not expected to be available until the spring of 2007. The eventual choice was for FEIG readers and antennas and Texas Instruments/Impinj tags complying with the EPC Global Gen2 standard. The tags were supplied in an adhesive label format.
A temperature-sensitive version of the Avonwood active tag was specially developed for the blood products pilot. In order to monitor its operation KSW's Tempsens 13.56 MHz (HF) technology was additionally used, combining a passive tag and a temperature sensor (fed by a PowerPaper battery)..
Geodan supplied the Movida software platform. Movida supports all location and identification technologies currently on the market. It uses connectors to translate the different location methodologies, in this case Avonwood's, to produce a uniform and standardized location protocol. The tag's current location and its location history are visible in the client application. Further information in addition to location can also be displayed. Examples would include the match between an individual and a blood product or the temperature value for a blood product.
As well as supplying the databases, Oracle also provided the sensor-edge middleware used to record the passive technology
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Interference with medical equipment
During the preparation work for the pilot studies in the AMC it was decided to ask TNO to carry out a test on the effects that RFID systems and their infrastructure have on medical equipment. The background to this request to TNO was the unavailability of sufficient information from the literature and/or scientific publications to allow certainty as to the degree to which the application of RFID would affect the performance of medical equipment. It is of great importance that the equipment used in highly complex and technical environments like operating theatres, intensive care departments and blood transfusion labs is not affected in any way by the application of this new technology, so that it remains completely safe for patients.
In summary, the test revealed that the majority of the equipment tested is sensitive to the signals transmitted by the passive RFID 868 MHz system at distances varying between 0 cm and 6 m. A few items of equipment appeared to be sensitive to the RFID 13.56 MHz system at a distance of 0 cm. Some equipment appeared to be sensitive to signals from the RFID 125 KHz system at distances between 5 cm and 2 m when this was used at the highest possible field strength. A fault was generated in a specific type of pacemaker programmer when the field strength of the active RFID 868 MHz system was reduced to the lowest available setting. The functioning of this pacemaker programmer was re-assessed following the installation of the RFID system in the operating theatre. This test led to the conclusion that the method for using this pacemaker programmer in practice guaranteed that the distance to the RFID antenna would be sufficiently large to prevent problems with interference. |
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