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Showing posts from November, 2012

RFID tracking for mapping people moving around a hospital

Last week I was talking to an very interesting individual regarding mapping how people move around in hospitals for the purpose of understanding how infections spread through a?hospital. Although it was just a general conversation, if I remember correctly they wanted to map out the movement into a diagram of nodes and edges. For example the wards could be nodes and the people could be the edges between the wards.? I haven't really thought on the theory of it very much yet but I think it would be a brilliant piece of research to flesh out (I hope they are able to carry on with it).? It just got me thinking about how you would effectively track patients movement through a hospital. Ideally the movement would have to be monitored anonymously so people didn't feel they were being tracked. I wonder if one technique would be to give all people coming into the hospital an RFID tag (perhaps a card) that they can carry around with them. At each entrance to a room / ward / area the RFID