sources tell me Rfid: Tagging curative Innovation
"Patients leaving hospital with surgical instruments inside them." (DailyMail, April 2007).
Rfid: Tagging curative Innovation
"Sponge left inside Palm Beach County judge during surgery spurs him to seek reforms." (Palm Beach Post, September 2010).
"Surgical Tools Left in 1,500 Patients Per Year." (New England Journal of Medicine, January 2003).
Troubling headlines like these could be a thing of the past by using the same technology many already have in their cars.
Commuters, for example, often have sensor devices in their car that enable them to just drive right on straight through a toll booth instead of having to stop to pay the toll. This toll-paying technology uses something called Radio-frequency identification (Rfid for short).
Over the past few years, however, Rfid technologies have gone way beyond helping commuter's get to work on time...
Here's how it works.
Rfid technologies use radio waves to automatically identify citizen or objects. The most base formula of identification is to store a serial whole on a microchip. This microchip is attached to an antenna (the chip and the antenna together are called an Rfid transponder or an Rfid tag). The antenna enables the chip to transmit the identification facts to a reader. The reader converts the radio waves from the Rfid tag into digital info and the digital info is then passed on to computers to decipher it.
Some operating rooms, like the University of Pennsylvania, have major pieces of tool tagged with Rfid devices associated to a virtual web-based map of the operating room. If person happens to misplace that (often expensive) equipment, staff can just go to the web-based map to find out where it's hiding.
Can't these medical devices and tool just have a bar code, you may ask?
Sure, but bar codes are "line-of-sight" technology, meaning that a scanner has to "see" the bar code to read it. Where Rfid tags can be read as long as they are within range of a reader. If a bar code label is ripped or soiled, something that would most in effect happen if left in your rib cage, there's no way to scan the object.
Another thing to note about Rfid, for all you medical devices salespeople out there...
This same technology is also being used at some hospitals to track hospital and operating room visitors...
According to Dr. William Hanson, author of The Edge of Medicine: Technologies That Will change Our Lives, "We insist that visiting salesmen wear Rfid-tagged fluorescent vests so that if person wants to find a prosthesis salesman who was just lurking around where he shouldn't have been a integrate of minutes ago, we can track him down."
Something to think about next time you go out on a sales call!
While Rfid technology in effect has many benefits, together with decreasing malpractice lawsuits due to a leftover "gift" in a surgery patient's abdomen, some take issue with the "next-gen" uses of Rfid...
As mentioned above, Rfid can help identify objects or people. Non-hominid, animate "objects," for example, that most commonly interact with Rfid tags are our pooches and kitties. When I adopted my beloved Rat Terrier from the shelter, I opted to have an Rfid chip implanted in the middle of her shoulder blades so that we could in effect be reunited should she be unable to find home. As I found her as a stray, it just made sense to not have her in a "lost" situation again.
But in humans?
Some argue that this will leave us "nowhere to hide." Others say that it'll make it too easy for "business, corporations, Wal-Mart, and Uncle Sam" to use and intrude...
And still others? Well, being "tagged" just makes them feel like a slab of meat!
At this point in time, the idea of "tagging" citizen just steps over the line for most.
So, what do you think?
Rfid: A great innovation that can help save lives, find lost people, keep us safe, and protect our well-being?
Or...
Rfid: Way too sci-fi and an unjustifiable invasion of privacy?
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