Wireless Radio-Frequency Technology for Remote and Non-Invasive Health Monitoring

Background: Medical costs in the U.S. have risen rapidly and substantially. Adding to this health-care cost problem is the growing numbers of elderly adults, population, increased longevity, and more demands for different health care services resulting from changes in life styles. Implementing advanced technologies for health treatments not only will help reduce medical costs and improve the treatment for patients, but also extend the healthcare to places like rural communities or undeveloped countries.

Objective/Purpose: To develop techniques utilizing radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology for personal health examination and monitoring.

Methods: Our methods are based on RFID systems that can acquire, store, process, and report specific data or information about objects at an appropriate time and location, determined by users or operators, via wireless means.

Results: We developed three techniques. Two techniques involve using RFID sensors internal and/or external to human body.  The third technique involves monitoring of patients in a hospital setting using RFID networks. The monitoring is done wirelessly, either continuously or periodically, in which the sensors collect patient’s condition and transmit to a router or portable device connected to the internet, from which patient’s condition can be diagnosed and viewed by medical professionals.

Discussion/Conclusions: Instantaneous information allows medical professionals to intervene properly and timely to prevent possible catastrophic effects to patients. Continuously monitored information provides medical professionals more complete and long-term studies of patients.  All these result in not only enhancement of the health treatment quality but also significant reduction of medical expenditure. These techniques demonstrate that health monitoring of patients can be done wirelessly at any time and any place without interfering with the patients’ normal activities. Implementing RFID technology would not only help reduce the enormous medical costs, but also help improve the health treatment as well as enhance the understanding of long-term personal health and illness.