Leveraging RFID in hospitals: patient life cycle and mobility perspectives

The application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to patient care in hospitals and healthcare facilities has only just begun to be accepted. This article develops a set of frameworks based on patient life cycle and time-and-motion perspectives for how RFID can be leveraged atop existing information systems to offer many benefits for patient care and hospital operations. It examines how patients are processed from admission to discharge, and considers where RFID can be applied. From a time-and-motion perspective, it shows how hospitals can apply RFID in three ways: fixed RFID readers interrogate mobile objects; mobile, handheld readers interrogate fixed objects; and mobile, handheld readers interrogate mobile objects. Implemented properly, RFID can significantly aid the medical staff in performing their duties. It can greatly reduce the need for manual entry of records, increase security for both patient and hospital, and reduce errors in administering medication. Hospitals are likely to encounter challenges, however, when integrating the technology into their day-to-day operations. What we present here can help hospital administrators determine where RFID can be deployed to add the most value

Radio Frequency Identification: Supply Chain Impact and Implementation Challenges

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has received considerable attention from practitioners, driven by mandates from major retailers and the United States Department of Defense. RFID technology promises numerous benefits in the supply chain, such as increased visibility, security and efficiency. Despite such attentions and the anticipated benefits, RFID is not well-understood and many problems exist in the adoption and implementation of RFID. The purpose of this paper is to introduce RFID technology to practitioners and academicians by systematically reviewing the relevant literature, discussing how RFID systems work, their advantages, supply chain impacts, and the implementation challenges and the corresponding strategies, in the hope of providing guidance for practitioners in the implementation of RFID technology and offering a springboard for academicians to conduct future research in this area

Antecedents and outcomes of brand management from the perspective of resource based view (RBV) theory

Brand management requires greater emphasis on internal factors to increase brand performance. A model of antecedents and outcomes of brand management is developed in this study based on the Resource Based View (RBV) Theory. Top management emphasis on brand, corporate supportive resources and market orientation are identified as crucial internal factors or antecedents for success of brand management. Apart from that, the brand management measurement are expanded in this study with the introduction of three new marketing constructs namely marketing capabilities, innovation and brand orientation as new dimensions in brand management which currently comprised of management related constructs. This study also contributes in the brand management of small and medium enterprise (SMEs) literature as previous studies mainly focused on the brand management for multinational companies or large organizations. One important issue of SMEs is the “internal” brand management which is currently under-researched even though it is critical in brand building and management. Therefore, this research aims to highlight the antecedents and outcomes of brand management in Malaysians’ SMEs based on RBV theory. A comprehensive literature review was done and a conceptual model is proposed in this literature review

Feasibility of Warehouse Drone Adoption and Implementation

While aerial delivery drones capture headlines, the pace of adoption of drones in warehouses has shown the greatest acceleration. Warehousing constitutes 30% of the cost of logistics in the US. The rise of e-commerce, greater customer service demands of retail stores, and a shortage of skilled labor have intensified competition for efficient warehouse operations. This takes place during an era of shortening technology life cycles. This paper integrates several theoretical perspectives on technology diffusion and adoption to propose a framework to inform supply chain decision-makers on when to invest in new robotics technology

Feasibility Study of RFID Technology for Construction Load Tracking

INE/AUTC 10.0

Teaching and learning mathematics and science in English in primary schools in the state of Johor, Malaysia

This article attempts to highlight the opinions of the public on the effectiveness of the use of English in teaching and learning Mathematics and Science (PPSMI) in primary schools in Johor. After nearly six years of its implementation, some people found out that the students have not demonstrated a good command of the language and the acquisition of knowledge of Mathematics and Science is seen to be declining. The teachers also do not seem to adapt well in the implementation. A group of respondents from among the headmasters and headmistress have given their views through a questionnaire and structured interview that showed the government's intention to strengthen the English language in teaching and learning Mathematics and Science did not show an impressive result. Thus, the study suggests that the government can try to give an option of using both languages in the implementation of this policy

Unified Communications for Space Inventory Management

To help assure mission success for long-duration exploration activities, NASA is actively pursuing wireless technologies that promote situational awareness and autonomy. Wireless technologies are typically extensible, offer freedom from wire tethers, readily support redundancy, offer potential for decreased wire weight, and can represent dissimilar implementation for increased reliability. In addition, wireless technologies can enable additional situational awareness that otherwise would be infeasible. For example, addition of wired sensors, the need for which might not have been apparent at the outset of a program, night be extremely costly due in part to the necessary routing of cables through the vehicle. RFID, or radio frequency identification, is a wireless technology with the potential for significant savings and increased reliability and safety in space operations. Perhaps the most obvious savings relate to the application of inventory management. A fully automated inventory management system is highly desirable for long-term sustaining operations in space environments. This assertion is evidenced by inventory activities on the International Space Station, which represents the most extensive inventory tracking experience base in the history of space operations. In the short tern, handheld RFID readers offer substantial savings owing to reduced crew time for inventory audits. Over the long term, a combination of improved RFID technology and operational concepts modified to fully utilize the technology should result in space based inventory management that is highly reliable and requires very little crew time. In addition to inventory management, RFID is likely to find space applications in real-time location and tracking systems. These could vary from coarse-resolution RFID portals to the high resolution afforded by ultra-wideband (UWB) RFID. Longer range RFID technologies that leverage passive surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are being investigated to track assets on a lunar or planetary surface

A sector analysis for RFID technologies: fundamental and technical analysis for financial decision making problems

Automatic identification technologies have been used in a wide range of applications for reducing the amount of time and labor needed to input data and improving data accuracy. As an important automatic identification technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies allow contactless reading and these technologies are particularly successful in manufacturing and other environments where traditional identification technologies such as bar codes can not perform well. By integrating the RFID technology into their business models, companies may save time, lower labor cost, improve products quality and provide better service. RFID is the wireless technology that uses RF communication to identify, track and manage objects and collect and store data. RFID technology enables companies to develop applications that create value by tracking and identifying objects, animals or people. Business applications of RFID technology can be seen in areas such as manufacturing, supply chain management, software integration, security systems, asset tracking and many others. RFID technology was predicted to be one of the “top ten” technologies in 2004 by CNN. Although, the RFID market is less than five years old, it has been applied to many different industries, from retail industry to logistics, or from healthcare to service business industry – and it is still growing. Particularly, RFID has fundamental influences on today's retailing and supply chain management for applications like asset tracking the inventory control and management. RFID technology also finds major application in mobile phones and is widely used in toll collection of highways, for payments in restaurants, vending machines, retail and parking lots. There are a wide range of RFID systems currently being used or being developed. Examples to these systems include but not limited to the following; automatic vehicle and personnel access control for security (Simpson, 2006), airport passenger and baggage tracking (Ferguson, 2006), tracing blood for cutting down errors such as giving patients wrong blood types (Ranger, 2006), payment process systems (Ramachandran, 2006), production control in manufacturing (Liu & Miao, 2006), transfusion medicine (Knels, 2006) real-time inventory control by automated identification of items in warehouses, tracking and management of physical files, tracking of books in the libraries (Shadid, 2005). For some other applications, interested reader is referred to (Finkenzeller, 2003; Smith, 2004). RFID solution providers claim that their technology and solutions bring significant benefits and have valuable advantages in practice. As new RFID solutions being developed and more RFID tags and equipments being used, these solutions will become more cost effective and RFID businesses are expected to grow rapidly. Since RFID is fairly new, it’s difficult to measure resulting sales increases or heightened customer satisfaction quotients. On the other hand, according to IDC estimation (IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group, a leading technology media, research, and events company and provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets), companies in the retail sector will spend nearly $1.3 billion on RFID in their supply chain operations in 2008, compared to about$91.5 million in 2003 which corresponds to annual growth rate of 70 percent. In a similar look; the Wireless Data Research Group projected that the global market for RFID increased from $1 billion in 2003 to$3 billion in 2007 (Asif & Mandviwalla, 2005). There are two major drivers of this growth. The first one is the adoption of RFID technology by major retailers and government agencies. The second one is the reduction in the price of RFID tags, readers, and IT systems required to deploy RFID. Given the huge potential of RFID technology, there has been a huge emergence of RFID specialty companies and the development of RFID practices within many market-leading companies. Due to huge emergence, it is desirable to make a sector analysis. In this study, we perform a sector analysis for RFID technologies for researchers and analysts. We investigate public RFID companies traded on the stock exchange markets, summarize their financial performance, describe their RF products, services, and applications, and perform fundamental and technical analysis