# RFID Technology for Management and Tracking: e-Health Applications
## 4 Discussion  
The RFID system presented in Section 2, although quite simple, shares several characteristics with others already operational in hospitals worldwide cited in the literature review of Section 1. As in those systems, the hardware front-end consists of several antennas placed in the areas of interest within the hospital connected to an RFID reader. Items and patients to be monitored are tagged with passive RFID tags. Information about the tags detected by the reader is sent to a database that stores the status of these tags and the associated items. Using a mobile application, end-users can retrieve information about the items in real-time (events, location, etc.).  
The simple proof-of-concept shown in this contribution proves the feasibility and ease of implementation and use of these systems. In this case, it should be remarked that once the items are tagged with RFID tags, potential users (doctors, nurses) do not need to interact with the hardware front-end. Furthermore, RFID antennas and readers could be hidden on the roof of the rooms and hallways so that employees, patients and visitors would not notice this hardware infrastructure. This is an important advantage over other RFID technologies that require the users to come closer to RFID readers (e.g., NFC, HF RFID).  
Physical layer characterization, and, in particular, assessment of the radioelectric coverage should be taken into account when deploying UHF RFID systems, as reflections in walls and objects (especially in those with large metallic surfaces) may result in unexpected readings of tags outside the designed coverage area. Depending on the scenario, a basic coverage analysis as the one described in Section 2.1 can be enough. RSS information of the backscattered signal could be used to ensure that the detected RFID tag is actually within the coverage area of the RFID antenna. For example, RSS values could be stored in the database of the system and, if they are below a certain threshold, a message could be displayed (e.g., \"item #n not detected properly. Please place it in another location\").  
As mentioned in Section 1, one of the design goals of IoT-based systems for management and logistics is to minimize human interaction with the system, not only increasing the level of comfort of the users, but also minimizing the risk of mistakes. Even though this kind of RFID system is conceived to increase the level of automation of routine tasks such as drug administration, it still requires a minimum interaction from the users (e.g., pressing the button \"medicine successfully administered\" in the case of the example presented in this contribution), and, as stated in Section 1, this procedure  
Figure 10: Examples of items tagged with passive DogBone RFID tags [31], emulating medical assets and drugs containers: (1) aspirin, (2) tranexamic acid, (3) ibuprofen, (4) sodium chlorate.  
still has some risk of human failure/mistake (e.g., pressing the button in advance, and then not administering the drug). Nevertheless, these RFID systems can also contribute to making the location and identification of medical errors easier, as they provide location and time information about the items registered within the system (medical assets, medicines, etc.).  
Another possible improvement, already introduced in other areas where RFID systems are used for management and logistics could be related to automatic registration and removal of medical assets in the database, without requiring an end-user to manually insert the information associated to each item. These procedures can be implemented by placing several RFID antennas and readers devoted to registering new medical items, so every time a RFID tag is read by these antennas a new register in the database is created. Similarly, several RFID antennas and tags can be located in the area devoted to medical assets and drug disposal: every time an RFID tag is read in this area of the hospital, the item is deleted from the database.