IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 39

some form of biometric verification information, such as a thumb
print. The card may also store
essential medical information, such
as blood type and allergies. However, the system is not designed for
supporting mission-critical medical cases as the wide-area communication infrastructure may not
always be sufficiently robust at
remote locations.
The community healthcare workers are each provided with a mobile
rFID read/write device equipped
with a graphic display so that information on a patient's rFID medical
card and information retrieved from
the central facility can both be utilized. This rFID read/write device
may also have a small keyboard
or a soft keypad based on touchscreen technology. In addition, sufficient onboard memory is needed
within the rFID read/write device
to hold essential information, especially when not "online."
The mobile rFID read/write
device has to be password or biometrically protected so that if the
device is stolen or lost, it cannot
be used by third parties to perform
unauthorized reading of a patient's
medical card or retrieval of information from the central medical
record database.
The rFID read/write device
will also be equipped for widearea wireless data (and preferably
voice) communications. Global
positioning system (GpS) based
location information can also
be included in the device to provide position and time stamps for
each transaction.

Service Process
For the system to work, certain service processes have to be in place.
The operation of the system will
require a patient to bring his/her
rFID medical card when visiting
a community healthcare worker or
the central facility. When a patient
interacts with a healthcare worker
in the field or at the central medical facility, the patient's rFID

The goal of an RFID-backed
community healthcare solution
is to enable easy and reliable
identification of individual patients,
maintain more accurate medical
records, facilitate better healthcare,
and enhance the quality of life in
communities that are remote from
a central medical facility.
medical card will be read to verify
the person's identity. This will
also facilitate the download of the
most up-to-date version of the person's medical record information
from the central database to the
mobile rFID device. At the conclusion of the healthcare service
transaction, the healthcare worker
can update both the rFID medical
card as well as the central medical
record database. This execution
of the read/write process by the
mobile rFID device also serves
to notify the central medical facility of the transaction in order to
facilitate account reconciliation
with the community healthcare
worker or any other third parties
at a later time.
When a community healthcare
worker is operating at remote locations, the download or upload of
information is facilitated by a widearea communication link. In the situation where fixed wireless access
is not available, which is likely to be
the case in many emerging economies, cellular-based wide area communications is frequently assumed.
Thus an underlying assumption for
the system to function well is that
the remote communities will need
to have mobile communication coverage available.
If this is not the case, the updating of the central database will
have to be done on a non-real time,
offline basis. In this case, a copy
of the last known medical record

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2013

of the patients may be stored in the
mobile rFID reader device by each
of the associated healthcare workers. Given that for most remote
locations, the data transfer rates
of mobile systems would likely to
be relatively slow, e.g. over General packet radio Service (GprS)
or Enhanced Data-rate for GSM
Evolution (EDGE), it is necessary
that information provisioned over
the mobile communication link be
concise. For the GprS/EDGE family of systems, the mobile rFID
read/write device will need to be
equipped with a subscriber identity
module, commonly known as SIM
cards, specific to a mobile data service provider.

Data Communication
and Support
The community healthcare worker
is expected to retrieve and upload
data during each transaction. The
volume of data to be retrieved
from the central facility should
be kept to a minimum to avoid
transmission delay and in most
cases should be limited to textbased information. This information includes the latest medical
records of the patient. Thus for
each transaction, the amount of
data to be transferred is expected
to be of the order of few tens of
kilobytes in both the uplink and
downlink directions.
With this amount of data transfer, the potential data transfer
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013