Abstract
Hospitals rely heavily on infusion pump and syringe pumps, which are actively and widely moved around the hospital to meet patient needs. These pumps are managed by the hospital's Medical Engineering (ME) center and must be maintained periodically to guarantee the reliability and safety of the equipment. However, in the busy environment of hospitals, some of these pumps can get misplaced or lost. If the pumps are not regularly inspected and serviced, patients' lives can ultimately be placed at risk. Thus, it is of grave importance that the whereabouts of these pumps be known at all time by the ME center. As a means of monitoring the location of this equipment, the authors devised a UHF band passive RFID tag system. With this RFID system, the location of the pumps can be tracked automatically with little effort from staff. Several experiments were conducted to inspect the reliability of the system, using the Sapporo Medical School Hospital as the venue for the experiment. From the results of the experiments, the locations of the RFID tagged pumps were identified accurately and easily within the tested areas of the hospital, confirming the feasibility and the practicality of the system for hospital use.
