Cristina Elena Turcu

An RFID-Based System for Emergency Health Care Services

Although substantial progress was made in improving the sharing of patient medical information among healthcare providers, professionals still need to address the issue of efficient electronic medical records. Thus, real-time information presents a persistent challenge to the emergency response community. In emergency situations, particularly with unconscious, incoherent and unaccompanied patients, providing emergency physicians with a patient’s accurate medical history could be the difference between life and death. The RFID technology has penetrated the healthcare sector due to its increased functionality, low cost, high reliability and easy-to-use capabilities. As the present paper demonstrates, our major aim was to design an RFID-based system architecture and data model that would provide efficient means to perform essential information management for emergency care across hospital and country boundaries.

The Social Internet of Things and the RFID-based robots

Internet of Things allows the interconnection of smart objects, such as mobile robots, wireless sensors, etc., and of human beings, by using different communication protocols and by developing a dynamic multi-modal heterogeneous network. This paper proposes some considerations on cognitive robots based on radio frequency identification technology within Internet of Things, by adding a social dimension to human-robot and robot-robot interactions. Social networks can be used for storing and sharing links to resources of interest for the humanrobot and robot-robot interactions. A Stinger robot-based prototype was built to demonstrate the presented functionalities. The prototype shows that this model is not only flexible, but also practical.

RFID-based Information System for Patients and Medical Staff Identification and Tracking

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is having a major impact on the health care industry. By attaching radio frequency tags to different entities (people and objects), RFID technology can provide identification, tracking, location, security and other capabilities. The goal of this chapter is to show how RFID technology can be used to reduce medical mistakes, improve patient safety and enhance the quality of medical service in hospitals. After briefly introducing the eHealth domain and some of the healthcare issues, this chapter describes how the RFID technology can be used in healthcare. Thus the third section describes some hospital use cases that could benefit from RFID technology. Also it briefly presents some of the existing projects that successfully implement this emerging technology in healthcare. The next section shows how to use a medical staff and patients tracking application, called the RFIDHospitalTracker, to improve the quality of the hospital services. We have developed the RFIDHospitalTracker to support the high requirements for scalability, reliability and security. An overview of its distributed software architecture is given. Also, this section enumerates some open problems that still have to be solved before RFID technology will be fully embraced by the healthcare community. The last part presents some of the future developments proposed by our research team. The conclusion summarizes the main achievements of this chapter.

Integrating RFID Technologies in B2B Applications for Enterprise Supply Chain

This paper presents Web platform for business relations among great enterprises, corporations and groups, in order to optimize materials control on the entire supply chain. Each item and component will bear a transponder which allows their unique identification. Thus, on the basis of identification codes attached to materials and subassemblies, components and origin of each finished article, as well as subassemblies components and constituent component origin etc. will be subject to control in every enterprise that participates in the making of a finished article. By extension of the system to the entire supply chain-final producer, supplier, suppliers suppliers etc.-the final consumer will be able to trace back the origin of materials which have been included in the end product.

Enhancing the Flexibility of Manufacturing Systems Using the RFID Technology

The introduction of RFID technology in the manufacturing environment provides the basis for implementing much more agile systems by providing continuous, real-time information relating to the movement of physical items. The components traceability, enabled by RFID technology, may be used to increase the degree of automation of the system calibration process at the shop floor level. An interesting aspect relating to the calibration process of a complex reconfigurable system is how to automatically determine the production facility’s positions and the optimum routes between them, especially when the system is consisting of a big number of production facilities, routes and switches. This paper proposes an RFID-based method to automatically determine the positions of the production facilities involved in the manufacturing process, placed along conveyor belts. The information acquired in the discovering process will allow the optimal leading of raw materials towards the production facilities to be processed.

Integrating Mobile Applications into RFID Based B2B Systems

This paper presents the principles governing the design and development of a mobile application, as well as various aspects regarding its integration into a more complex RFID_B2B (radio frequency identification - business to business) system. Extending the applicability of RFID_B2B systems represents the main goal of such applications, which are generally expected to handle large amount of data, to operate in stand-alone mode and to allow their easy integration into complex RFID_B2B systems. The paper proposes new solutions and ideas regarding the design and development of a secure and very fast method for the communication and synchronization between the B2B servers and a mobile application running on various mobile devices.

An internet of things-based distributed intelligent system with self-optimization for controlling traffic-light intersections

The rapid increase in vehicle fleet size and consequently in traffic volume is not always followed by an increase in road space. As a result, traffic congestion occurs, especially in large urban areas. Therefore, in order to avoid traffic jams, immediate solutions have to be found. Various technologies have been used to design and develop such solutions in the past. While some developers have used classic technologies, others have integrated various emerging technologies in the systems they built in order to make roadways safer. Acting both inside the vehicle and along the roadways the new designed systems are able to inform drivers about traffic conditions and possible hazards. This paper proposes an Internet of Things-based approach to solve some of the problems that traffic congestion raises. Furthermore, this approach provides the means to monitor a set of environmental parameters, including air quality, and to raise early warnings and alarms when critical levels are reached. This approach offers a solution to increasing traffic-related pollution (which has a negative impact on the environment and on peoples health), to economic losses and to other issues caused by traffic congestions. In order to reduce accident risks when various intervention vehicles enter the cross-roads, we also propose a solution based on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.

An RFID-based system for product authentication

This paper aims at presenting a project that joins the efforts to reduce the trade of counterfeit products, by developing an RFID-based integrated system, which would constitute a secure and low cost solution for the authentication of brand products, as well as for monitoring their traceability, building at the same time a software support for the control of distribution along the supply chain.

Improvement of Supply Chain Performances Using RFID Technology

As markets become more global and competition intensifies, firms are beginning to realize that competition is not exclusively a firm versus firm domain, but a supply chain against supply chain phenomenon (***a, 2008). Under these circumstances, an increasing strategic importance to any organization independent of size or of sector, is to deliver information, goods and services in full, on time and error-free to customers. From demand forecasting, to the sourcing of raw materials, right through to manufacture and dispatchvisibility in the supply chain is becoming an important facet of any modern operation (Coltman et al., 2008). But at this moment, the interconnectivity between various links in the supply chain is incomplete and inaccurate, every link in the chain being an individualistic entity with different processes. This leads to poor product visibility and stock transparency across the supply chain. For companies looking at multiple markets, the lack of visibility in their supply chain can lead to tremendous loss of revenue. But even if information technology is used within a supply chain to share information on end-customer demand and inventory levels, there is still often a discrepancy between this information and the real physical flow of products. This discrepancy frequently derives from the missing real-time or near real-time data in concordance with the physical flow of goods. The result is inaccurate inventory information. Reasons why information system inventory records are inaccurate include external and internal theft, unsaleables (e.g. damaged, out-of-date, discontinued, promotional, or seasonal items that cannot be sold any longer), incorrect incoming and outgoing deliveries (Raman et al., 2001; Fleisch & Tellkamp, 2003), as well as misplaced items (Raman et al., 2001). Thus, even when inventory records are accurate, misplaced items mean that they were not out of stock, but rather misplaced in storage areas or in the wrong location within the store. The phenomenon of inventory inaccuracy is well-known. As Raman et al. (Raman et al., 2001) show in their case study, most retailers cannot precisely identify the number of units of a given item available at a store; thus for more than 65% of stock keeping units (SKUs) in retail stores, information on inventory in the inventory management system was inaccurate (i.e. the information system inventory differed from physical inventory). The difference was on average 35% of the target inventory. In a second case study, the authors found that a median of 3.4% of SKUs were not found on the sales floor although inventory was available O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg

Object-Oriented Solutions for Information Storage on RFID Tags

Already moving into the real world through a wide variety of applications, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology uses radio waves to uniquely identify an entity (object, animal, or person). This data collection technology uses electronic tags to store identification data and other specific information, and a reader to read and write tags. A tag is a chip with an antenna. Tags fall into three categories: are active (battery- powered), passive (the reader signal is used for activation) or semi-passive (battery-assisted, activated by a signal from the reader). In certain tag types, the information on the tag is reprogrammable. There are existing and proposed RFID standards that deal with the air interface protocol (the way tags and readers communicate), data content (the way data is organized or formatted), conformance (ways to test whether products meet the standard) and applications (how standards are used on shipping labels, for example). RFID solutions run at several frequencies: • Low – from 125 KHz to 134 KHz (LF) • High – 13.56MHz (HF) • Ultra High – 860-960 MHz (UHF) • Micro Wave – 2.45 GHz The cost of simple RFID tags is likely to fall to roughly