RFID MEDICINE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Abstract

This study proposes a framework of medicine management system based on the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).The heavy workloads of the hospital often result in that the nurses give patients the wrong medicine. This situation leads to the patient injury, and even death. In order to improve the quality of health care, this paper integrates the RFID, network and database techniques to develop a graphical medicine management system. In the proposed system, each patient has a RFID tag and each kind of medicine also is encoded to a RFID number. The digital patient information forms contain the medicinal information of each patient. When a nurse gives medicine to a patient, he or she must check the patient's RFID tag and the medicinal number to avoid the situation of taking wrong medicines.

Keywords:RFID; Health care; Medicine; Digital patient information

1. Introduction

RPID is the main technology for the ubiquitous environment by providing the identity to the physical object. The RPID consists of a tag and a card reader. The tag contains an induction circuit, it can transmit identification data through radio wave without battery. When the card reader emits energy to the tag intermittently from a distance, the circuit in the tag can be electrified, exchanging information with the reader, so that manual work is not needed during identification, it is applicable to greasy and heavily dusty harsh environments [I]. RPID has been successful used in widely applications, such as inventory management and supply chain to increase the business efficiency. It also can be adopted for objects identification, access control, fleet maintenance, equipment and parts maintenance, parking log access control, toll gate system, car tracking, manufacturing line control, etc [2] [3].

In recent years, RPID has been applied to wider fields.Since January 1, 2005, the global retail leader Wal-Mart has required its top 100 suppliers to fix RPID tags to delivery cartons, initiating the global popularity of RPID application.978-1-4673-1487-9/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE At present, the RPID intelligent chips, which are readable/writable and can prevent unauthorized access, can be found in daily life, such as product packages, smart ID cards, access control, Easy Card, parking payment or ticket systems. The RPID chips may be applied to shopping in department stores or convenience stores, borrowing and returning books in libraries, and accessing public transportations. Therefore, the RPID will enter a fast growing stage, given the rapid development of its technology, chip,card reader, software and business.The RPID technology can be divided into low frequency system, HF system (frequency is 13.56MHz), UHF system in frequency range about 900MHz, and system working in microwave frequency band of 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz [4]. The operating frequency range of low frequency RPID chip (passive) is 30kHz�300kHz, the typical operating frequencies are 125KHz and 133KHz. It is mainly applied to access control, Easy Card, animal and plant ID, and machine-controlled authorization check. The low frequency RPID reads slowly, but that is not the major problem, because it is used in short information uploaded only. The low frequency tag is generally passive tag, and its work energy is derived from the radiating near field of coupling coil of card reader in inductive coupling mode. The ISO standards for low frequency RPID are 11484/85 and 14223. At present, the RPID intelligent chips, which are readable/writable and can prevent unauthorized access, can be found in daily life, such as product packages, smart ID cards, access control, Easy Card, parking payment or ticket systems. The RPID chips may be applied to shopping in department stores or convenience stores, borrowing and returning books in libraries, and accessing public transportations. Therefore, the RPID will enter a fast growing stage, given the rapid development of its technology, chip,card reader, software and business.The RPID technology can be divided into low frequency system, HF system (frequency is 13.56MHz), UHF system in frequency range about 900MHz, and system working in microwave frequency band of 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz [4]. The operating frequency range of low frequency RPID chip (passive) is 30kHz�300kHz, the typical operating frequencies are 125KHz and 133KHz. It is mainly applied to access control, Easy Card, animal and plant ID, and machine-controlled authorization check. The low frequency RPID reads slowly, but that is not the major problem, because it is used in short information uploaded only. The low frequency tag is generally passive tag, and its work energy is derived from the radiating near field of coupling coil of card reader in inductive coupling mode. The ISO standards for low frequency RPID are 11484/85 and 14223.The 13.56MHz high frequency RPID system is applied to many industrial fields, this system is classified as passive type, because its operating principle is identical with low frequency tag's, namely working in inductive coupling mode.The typical applications of high frequency RPID include electronic ticket, electronic ID card, and electronic locking anti-theft. Relevant international standards are IS014443,IS015693, and IS018000-3 (13.56MHz). The systems of ISO standards 14443 and 18000-3 are slow relatively, one read operation of them requires several seconds in certain cases, and different data volumes require different durations.The systems of ISO 15693 standard type can cope with moving objects at the maximum speed of O.5m1s. They can make a data transmission speed as high as 26.48kbps, and can identify 30 objects per second.However, in large-scale logistics application, the traditional method at 13.56MHz cannot meet the demand. In order to tackle massive and fast logistics application, Infineon Technologies introduced the phase jitter modulation (PJM) technology chip. The PJM chip can identify hundreds of objects at the same time by using electronic non-contact technology, even if these objects are stacking or moving fast.Besides being applied to file management, the RFID tag of PJM enables the tagged objects anywhere on the conveyer belt to pass by the card reader at a high speed, and the objects can be read one by one at a very high data rate, such as identifying tightly packed medicine and airport luggage tracking [5]. Infineon Company and Australia Magellan Technology Company have developed the chips for this application jointly based on the PJM technology of Magellan.As compared with the present 13.56MHz RFID technology,the read-write speed of these chips is faster by 25 times, and the data rate is 848kbps. The PJM system is optimized for logistics (ISO Standard 18000-3 Mode 2). It can identify,read and write as many as 500 tags reliably within one second.The readers are competent for these new chips even if the target speed is 4 m/sec [5].The UHF and microwave frequency band RFID tags are called microwave RFID tag. Its typical operating frequencies are 433.92MHz, 862 (902)928MHz, 2.45GHz and 5.8GHz. The microwave RFID tag can be classified into active tag and passive tag. The coupled mode between tag and card reader is electromagnetic coupling mode during operation. The antenna radiation field of card reader supplies radio frequency energy for the passive tag and arouses the tag.The reading distance of the corresponding RFID system is generally more than 1 m. It is 4�6m in typical cases, and the maximum value is more than 10 m. Based on the present technical level, the successful products of passive microwave RFID tag are concentrated on the operating frequency range of 902�928MHz relatively. Most of 2.45GHz and 5.8GHz RFID systems in the market are semi-passive microwave RFID tag products. The semi-passive tags mostly use button cells as power supply, with a long reading distance relatively.There are three types of RFID tags: passive RFID tags,active RFID tags, and battery assisted passive (BAP) RFID tag. The passive RFID tags have no power source and require an external electromagnetic field to initiate a signal transmission. The active RFID tags contain a battery and can transmit signals once an external source (,Interrogator') has been successfully identified. The battery assisted passive(BAP) RFID tags require an external source to wake up but have significant higher forward link capability providing greater range [6].

2. System structure of RFID

As shown in Figure 1, the RFID system consists of three major parts, reader, tag, and application system in the host. The antenna on the reader emits magnetic field or electromagnetic wave, the tag receives the electromagnetic wave through the induced magnetic field or the antenna. Take UHF as an example, the tag receives the electromagnetic wave from the reader through the antenna, the RF signal from the reader through the AC to DC circuit is converted into DC power, the energy is stored in large capacitance, and the involved information is converted into digital signal for processing.

3. RFID Medicine Management System

Figure 2 is the system structure diagram of this project.The server provides the graphical user interface and stores the database management system for patient information forms.The network data are in 3-tier structure in this project. The digital patient information forms contain the medicinal information of each patient are stored in the database.The doctors enter the medicinal information of patients.Each patient has a RFID tag and each kind of medicine also is encoded to a RFID number. When the nurse gives the medicine to the patients, firstly, he or she must check the patient's RFID tag matching the RFID number associated to the medicine appeared on the patient information forms. The structure of proposed method is discussed as following subsections.

3.1 Database access

Like most of information systems, the back end of RFID application system uses database to store necessary data, for example, parking payment, status identification of access system, warehousing system and travel information of Easy Card are related to database. This study used ASP.NET as the development tool, connected to the SQL Server database for database programming.The user has to connect the DBMS before accessing data in the database, and then uses SQL instruction to operate the data sheet. The ASP connects connection object to DBMS.The standard DBMS data access adopts SQL grammar, the ASP.NET uses command object to execute SQL instruction to operate the data sheet. A virtual data sheet will be generated when the SQL instruction is executed, this virtual data sheet records the datasets meeting the SQL query conditions, however, it does not exist in the database practically, but in the memory or objects, so as to increase the data processing efficiency. The DataReader object and DataSet object in Figure 3 are the virtual data sheets after SQL processing. The data binding displays or operates the obtained objects. The ASP.NET is designed with two online modes, on-line and off-line, in order to reduce the data processing time and the database system's burden. The DataReader object is in charge of on-line data access. When the application program has sent an instruction, if it is query data, the data can be received by using this object. However,the DataReader object must be in on-line state as it works in online mode, and it reads only one data each time, so that it reads one by one, and cannot read randomly or backwards.However, it reads fast. The DataSet is in charge of off-line access, the DataSet consists of data table. It is stored in the application program end. The program does not need to connect the original database when accessing these databases,so it is called off-line database.

3.2 The Architecture of the Software Package

The system interface is composed by ASP.NET, using RFID as input unit. Fig. 4 shows the architecture of the software adopted in this paper. This package consists of two parts. One is for the database maintenance, and the other is for medicine management. The database maintenance is subdivided into two modules, medicine maintenance and patient information-forms maintenance. The medicine management is also subdivided into two modules, one is patient's medicine processing; the other is patient-medicine comparison. The medicine maintenance, patient information-forms maintenance and patient's medicine processing modules consist of three functions, delete a record,add a record and query. The patient-medicine comparison module has comparison and query functions. When the nurses give the medicine to a patient, the comparison function is used to check whether the medicine is right.

4. Implementation

Figure 5 shows the main menu of proposed method. The menu has two items, database maintenance and medicine management. Fig. 6 exhibits the interface of medicine maintenance. User can add, delete and query medicine in this interface. For serving someone who cannot read English, The name of medicine includes Chinese and English. Figure 7 shows the interface of patient information-forms maintenance.In this interface, user can input, delete, and query the information of patients. Figure 8 shows the patient's medicine processing interface. In this interface, doctor can input the medicine of patient. Figure 9 exhibits the interface of patient-medicine comparison. When the nurses give the medicine to the patient, he or she must check whether the medicine is right in this interface.

5. Conclusions

The RFID system is consisted of an antenna, transceiver,and integrated circuit with memory. It can transmit identification data through radio wave without battery. When the card reader emits energy to the tag intermittently from a distance, the circuit in the tag can be electrified, exchanging information with the reader. Based on the advantages of RFID, this study used ASP.NET to construct a RFID medicine management system, so as to avoid the situation of giving wrong medicine to patient.