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University Students Create a Virtual RFID-enabled Hospital
Avatars—representations of people (in this case, doctors, nurses, staff members and patients)—populate the site. The avatars and various assets are tagged with virtual RFID tags, each with its own unique number. There are also virtual RFID interrogators positioned in doorways and various other places throughout the hospital.
Using the tags and readers, the researchers have modeled a variety of business processes. For instance, one process simulates the delivery of equipment and goods to the hospital: A delivery truck drives up to a warehouse, where RFID-tagged items have been placed on a smart pallet (which has scanned the items' RFID tags to create a bill of lading). The avatar loads the smart pallet onto the delivery truck, then drives to the hospital. Once the truck backs up to a dock, an RFID-enabled robot picks up the pallet, scans the items' tags and transports the goods to the appropriate locations within the hospital.
Because these are virtual readers and tags, there are no missed tag reads, and read ranges are not constrained. "In Second Life," Thompson states, "you know where everything is at any given time, because it is a simulated environment." He adds, however, that detection probabilities—for example, tags will be read 95 percent of the time—can be inputted into the program, as can specific read ranges, to simulate a more realistic RFID implementation.
Ultimately, Thompson would like the project to move beyond modeling so the system can be utilized as a tool by real health-care organizations, including pharmacies and hospitals. Thompson and his team have devised a method for connecting an actual back-end database to Second Life via a programmable interface, and he says it is likely that any software system, such as a billing system, could be hooked up to the 3-D online world. Linking the virtual world with an actual system would enable hospitals to test a planned RFID deployment and determine how it works in the simulated world before actually going live with that system in the real world.
To further expand on this concept, Thompson and his students intend to work with the university's RFID lab this semester. The lab includes a life-size model of an RFID-enabled store, which Thompson's group plans to replicate in the virtual world, "creating a mirror image of this store," he says. The lab store uses a real-time location system (RTLS) to detect when tagged items are moved, and Thompson and his team will connect this RTLS to the virtual store in Second Life. Whenever the actual RTLS registers an event, such as an item's movement, that event will be depicted in the virtual world as well. "We're going to tie real software to the virtual world," he states.
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Using the tags and readers, the researchers have modeled a variety of business processes. For instance, one process simulates the delivery of equipment and goods to the hospital: A delivery truck drives up to a warehouse, where RFID-tagged items have been placed on a smart pallet (which has scanned the items' RFID tags to create a bill of lading). The avatar loads the smart pallet onto the delivery truck, then drives to the hospital. Once the truck backs up to a dock, an RFID-enabled robot picks up the pallet, scans the items' tags and transports the goods to the appropriate locations within the hospital.
Because these are virtual readers and tags, there are no missed tag reads, and read ranges are not constrained. "In Second Life," Thompson states, "you know where everything is at any given time, because it is a simulated environment." He adds, however, that detection probabilities—for example, tags will be read 95 percent of the time—can be inputted into the program, as can specific read ranges, to simulate a more realistic RFID implementation.
To further expand on this concept, Thompson and his students intend to work with the university's RFID lab this semester. The lab includes a life-size model of an RFID-enabled store, which Thompson's group plans to replicate in the virtual world, "creating a mirror image of this store," he says. The lab store uses a real-time location system (RTLS) to detect when tagged items are moved, and Thompson and his team will connect this RTLS to the virtual store in Second Life. Whenever the actual RTLS registers an event, such as an item's movement, that event will be depicted in the virtual world as well. "We're going to tie real software to the virtual world," he states.
