Dead Reckoning: Finding Your Way Inside

Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) are in most portable electronic devices that can connect to a network.  This technology has revolutionized travel.  They essentially eliminated the ability to get lost, assuming the user knows how to operate it.  This technology only really works outside though.  What about when someone wants to know how to navigate inside a building?  Dead Reckoning, or a system that can remember where a device has been in a room/building, could be an answer to this problem. 

Ultra-Low Power Bluetooth

There are over 2 billion devices in use today that are Bluetooth capable.  These devices are used in a wide variety of applications, from the standard wireless earpiece for the cell phone and wireless connections for gaming devices, to healthcare and wireless security applications.  As with every wireless industry, however, battery life is a big issue.  Out of the desire for greater battery life, Ultra-Lower Power (ULP) Bluetooth was born.

RFID to Revolutionize the Grocery Shopping Experience

Everything is going wireless nowadays.  Think of everything that can be done on your phone or computer that was inconceivable ten years ago.  Security companies are setting cameras up in homes so people can monitor activity from their phone when they are not home.  Cable companies are allowing people to access their home DVR systems through their phones and computers to watch TV recordings anytime.  The possibilities are becoming endless on what can be accomplished through handheld devices.  Now imagine some of those same technologies entering local grocery and convenience stores to help with the shopping process.

NFC on smartphones:  a safety assurance

One of the big tech advancements coming in 2012 will be the addition of NFC, or near field communication, to smartphones.   The iPhone 5 due out in June 2012 will surely have the technology.  What is NFC exactly?  It will allow your smartphone to talk back and forth with other devices, such as payment kiosks and check-in’s.  Think of going to a store and instead of getting a credit card out of your wallet, simply swipe you smartphone at the checkout and your account will automatically be charged.  No carrying cards or cash.  Projections are that 1 in 5 cell phones will have NFC technology by 2013. 

RFID And Shopping

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an important complementary technology. In the 1980's, there was a push to barcode all items at stores. The change in the shopping experience was dramatic. You no longer needed to wait for check-out staff to tabulate totals or compute savings from coupons. For management, prices could be set at a central location.

GPS and RFID

Passive radio frequency tags are relatively inexpensive to manufacture and embed with a small amount of binary information. This allows them to become a “Swiss army knife” solution to a multitude of problems, such as inventory management, pet identification, or personnel tracking. There seems to be few places the tags aren't being put.

A Year Away From The Office 

Why are surgical inventory management systems not more readily implemented? 

More than a couple of people have told me that typical hospitals with multiple room surgery centers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every year due to inaccurate record keeping of physician preference items. 

Many are using very manual methods of tracking inventory levels, expiration dates, and product recalls using high salary staff.  To put this in perspective, it is a big task to have the correct inventory on hand for a constantly changing usage requirement.  Some inventory is on consignment and most items have critical expiration dates that must be monitored every couple of days. 

RFID is very much needed in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains 

According to the Office of Compliance at the Food and Drug Administration, 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients in the U.S. today come from manufacturing facilities outside of the United States.  The number of pharmaceutical ingredients produced at foreign facilities doubled between 2001 and 2007.  What previously was an American drug supply is now a world drug supply.  Why did this happen?  Cost pressures drove manufacturing costs overseas where overhead costs and labor are less expensive.  Therefore, pharmaceutical drugs that many of us rely on every day and pick up at Walgreens and CVS come from a foreign manufacturing facility. 

Surgery Rooms should be run the same as a business. 

If you ran a store, would you run it the same way you operate a surgery room? The answer should be yes, however most often this is not the reality in hospitals. Why is it that a nurse with an RN degree spends his or her time gathering up the physician preference items to prepare for a surgery? Is the price of the item readily available to the nurse, or does the nurse search for it? Once the nurse finds the price, does he have to then enter this into the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) patient’s session manually?