发布时间：2021-11-11
Introduction
In WWII, fledgling RFID technology was once used to protect pilots from being shot down by
friendly forces. Pilots who rolled their planes discovered it changed the reflections of radio
signals back to observing radar which they could use to identify themselves. It was a powerful
discovery that would eventually be the basis of the first identification friend or foe (IFF) system,
a form of active RFID. Over the last 70 years since then Radio Frequency Identification has
advanced to become a versatile solution with wide impacts in industries ranging from aerospace
to healthcare and playing an integral role in keeping millions of people safe every day.
RFID are small tags that can either passively or actively transmit data over low-power radio
waves. Over the years, developments have made it smaller, cheaper, and more powerful—
RFID chips can measure as small as 0.15 x 0.15 millimeters in size and 7.5 micrometers thick,
aptly named “powder”—leading to its ubiquity in many facets of life. (You may be surprised to
know that your smartphone likely has a close-range RFID reader too.)
Today’s custom RFID applications have found new and greater significance in the medical
space. By enabling item-level visibility, health organizations can directly enhance human
biosafety and make their supply chains more accurate and responsive. But these applications
are far from the over-the-counter solutions that can be found online. To reap these RFID
benefits, custom engineering shops leverage several technologies, like AI and blockchain, in
tandem with RFID tags hardened against harsh environments, to make the tracking of small
things possible and bringing the story of their data to life.
COVID Catapults Touchless RFID Advantage
In 2020, the story of RFID hit an inflection point. Before, RFID could have remained
synonymous with supply chain inventory and ID badges, anything that needed easy tracking,
like a hands-free way of accessing secure places, or convenient and quick counting of items in
storage areas. Suddenly the “touchless” feature of RFID within the context of the new pandemic
became an elevated technological advantage. And though RFID would play a larger role in
disseminating COVID vaccines efficiently to millions worldwide, many custom engineering
shops tackled low-hanging problems that were presented immediately.
RFID Protects First Responders while Amplifying Efficiency
Latex gloves and isolation gowns proved a vital point where RFID could make an immediate
and tremendous impact. A necessity in medical practice, both are disposable and were prone to
huge financial costs because of that fact. To solve the glove issue, Texas Medical Technology
designed a latex glove dispenser that would dispense the appropriate sized glove based on the
RFID embedded in the healthcare worker’s ID badge. This provides hospitals and other facilities
the safety of a touchless glove dispenser, and importantly the added efficiency that can reduce
wastage and its associated costs.
On the other hand, isolation gowns, or iso-gowns, can have even greater financial costs,
starting at $2 apiece and rising due to shortages—it’s about the price of a box of latex gloves
every time a worker visits an isolation unit because iso-gowns must be thrown away after use
(some gowns are only used for 15 minutes). This type of personal protective equipment (PPE)
has further costs for the environment because they must be sterilized before going to a landfill,
not to mention the costs of manufacturing and delivering it to hospitals. “A less-expensive
alternative to disposable gowns is reusable garments,” said co-founder of Welspring, a PPE
manufacturer, Brendon Rowse, who offers an alternative. With a washable RFID tag, their
custom reusable iso-gowns can now be tracked through a sanitation process, the number of
cleanings and uses can be tallied, and workers are informed when each particular iso-gown is
approaching the end of its useful life. That’s 300 washes per gown; instead of $2 per use, it’s
now less than a cent. And even at that price Welspring promises a cooler and more comfortable
experience than “garbage bag” gowns.
RFID Is Preventing Calamitous Mistakes and Protecting Lives
While these applications of RFID have improved cost efficiencies, other applications are directly
improving the protection of lives. The tools that many professionals use pose very preventable
but catastrophic risks—a technician leaves a spanner in a jet engine before takeoff, or a
surgeon forgets a sponge in a patient. These incidents are common and problematic enough to
warrant their own classifications, for aircraft, foreign object debris (FOD) is the correct term, and
it’s a “never event” when it comes to healthcare. Both encompass many errors that lead to
serious injury or death, forgetting a tool in a compromising place is just one of them.
Boeing estimated FOD incidents could cause up to $4 billion in damages annually across the
entire aviation industry. There is a simple quality control check to combat this, after aircraft
maintenance, locate and verify all the tools in the assembly area. However, this check is time
consuming, and the RFID challenges are not like tracking iso-gowns, tool drawers are made of
metal which hamper RF signals. Yet, CribMaster, a division of Black and Decker, offers RFID
technology in mobile tool cabinets that overcome the dense metal of the drawers to capture all
tagged items within. For tools reported missing by the on-drawer displays, use their portable
handheld reader to find it lingering about, or it can find it on workers leaving the assembly area
who forgot a tool in their pocket.
In a similar way, surgeons face this challenge too (for safety, medical staff must laboriously
count tools before, during, and after surgery). But while oil is easily wiped off a wrench, of the
average 250 different tools a surgeon may touch during a typical operation, all of them must be
sterilized. Custom RFID tags can overcome sterilization, as in the iso-gowns, but more
challenging is the surgeon’s zero tolerance for changes in the form factor of her tools. Many
doctors are so trained on a set of tools that any deviation can dramatically reduce their
effectiveness. Wyss Institute at Harvard produces a tool set with an embedded RFID chip and
antenna that is nearly invisible, capable of being tracked in an operating room with hundreds of
other items, and able to resist repeated sterilizations. This same technology can be custom
designed for pacemakers, plates, and cardiac stents, stopping patients before mishaps happen
in places unfriendly to metal, like MRI machines.
Integrating RFID Tags Enhances Workflows and Supply Chains
Tracking patients outside the operating room using RFID moves our thinking from enclosed
spaces to open spaces and into more complexity. It is these complex systems that have
borrowed tremendously from the strides made with RFID in supply chain management. All
across Belgium, at the airport, at hospitals, and at supermarkets, Auxcis, a Belgium based
provider of RFID solutions, is tagging everything to improve their supply chains. In what seems
like one of the greatest initiatives for hyper-efficiency, RFID solutions at the item level are being
integrated into large enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to make replenishing
inventory seamless and error-free. In airports, passengers can track in real-time their luggage.
And in supermarket warehouses, there are over 1 billion “returnable transport items” (RTIs) in
circulation and tracked with RFID, each one used to transport fresh produce throughout the cold
supply chain.
RFID Vaccine Tracking Bolsters the World’s Pandemic Rescue at Hospitals
Those supply chain custom efficiency techniques are relevant to public health and safety as
well. Getting COVID vaccines to the world population is likely one of the most critical and
complex supply chain challenges ever because the demand is as urgent as the food in
supermarkets, and the consequences as deadly as leaving a sponge in a patient.
In the case of Pennsylvania hospital, they understood both the urgency of getting vaccines to
people, and the inventory challenge it presented, especially since the Pfizer vaccines they were
disseminating had a beyond-use-date of just 5 days. After just a few weeks of painstakingly
disseminating vaccines without easy RFID tracking, the hospital decided it needed a better way.
“Our vaccine inventory counts were incongruous at the end of some days”, the hospital’s
pharmacy operations manager, Alan Portnoy, said “and missing even one vial of vaccine is of
dire importance right now, especially considering that the Pfizer vaccine accounts for up to
seven doses.”
For the leadership at Reading Hospital, which was already using an RFID enabled system to
track pharmaceuticals received and administered to patients and was also tracking shelved 4
inventory and crash car inventories, the solution was more RFID tracking. Implementation of the
vaccine tracking was quick given the prior setup, which now allowed the hospital to track
vaccines throughout their life and then keep those digital records secure in the cloud, and
ultimately made it easier to send compliance records to the Pennsylvania Health Department,
receive from PHD new vaccine supplies, and improve the overall health services to the
community.
RFID Continues to Grow by Combining with New Technologies
Undeniably, COVID has been an accelerating influence in further adoption of RFID
technologies, but new applications and technologies in the future will continue to combine with
RFID technology in novel ways. One blockchain company and its partner, SUKU and Smartrac
respectively, are combining RFID and blockchain in order to create uniquely verifiable tags.
Information on the tags can identify product origins and pricing, and because of the beauty of
blockchain, the information cannot be manipulated. This has implications for COVID-19 test kits,
which with this technology can be authenticated from a legitimate source to be FDA-approved.
The advantages of combining RFID and blockchain are thought to be a natural technological
progression in supply chain management. RFID demand appears to support that “the tracking of
small things” will continue to play a significant role. The RFID market is forecasted with a CAGR
of 10.2%, and expected to reach $17.4 billion by 2026, up from $10.7 billion in 2021.
Custom RFID Expertise Partnerships
Understanding the principles of RFID are basic, navigating the complex technical challenges in
implementing custom solutions requires years of expertise and engineers who can handle the
technical implementation. For those in need of solutions in environments ranging from hospitals
to distribution centers, JADAK, a Novanta Company and leader in RFID custom solutions, has
proven expertise providing the broadest range of ThingMagic HF and UHF/RAIN RFID
integrations in the market today. Their stance on RFID is “tagnostic”, they work with every tag
vendor in the space so your custom solution is guaranteed to work in your application
regardless of the tags you use.
Sources
● https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/never-events
● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe#Early_concepts
● https://www.rfidjournal.com/rfid-finds-the-right-fit-for-automated-sterile-glove-dispensing
● https://www.rfidjournal.com/euro-pool-systems-depot-of-the-future-leverages-rfid-for-efficiency-accuracy
● https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/smart-tools-rfid-tracking-for-surgical-instruments/
●https://www.medicaldesignbriefs.com/component/content/article/mdb/features/articles/32814
● https://www.rfidjournal.com/iot-preserves-efficacy-of-covid-19-vaccines
● https://www.rfidjournal.com/how-the-iot-can-help-to-distribute-covid-19-vaccines
● https://www.rfidjournal.com/iot-companies-track-goods-aimed-at-covid-19-treatment-vaccinations
● https://thefutureofthings.com/3221-hitachi-develops-worlds-smallest-rfid-chip/
● https://www.rfidjournal.com/rfid-tracks-reusable-isolation-gowns-for-hospitals-care-facilities
● https://www.dqindia.com/rfid-and-its-importance-in-the-post-covid-world/
● https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/coronavirus-rfid-sensor-tracking-hospital-supply-chain/581066/
● https://www.detego.com/retail_insights_en/retail-en/ai_meet_rfid
