May 14, 2013Gentag and Advanced Health & Care (AHC) are offering a low-cost radio frequency identification solution for managing services supplied by home health-care providers. The system consists of a low-cost Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled cell phone, designed by Gentag, and software from AHC. With the system, health-care workers are issued the phones, which they can tap against an RFID tag installed within a client's home, to indicate when they arrive and leave. The phone also allows for calls, text messages and Internet browsing, while the software collects data regarding visits and provides workers with details about the tasks they must complete at each site.
Advanced Health & Care, a U.K.-based supplier of IT solutions for out-of-hospital and home health-care provider organizations, developed the system for homecare providers in the United Kingdom, and is supplying those users with Gentag NFC-enabled handsets. The solution is being utilized by homecare providers, including those working for the Bath and North East Somerset branches of Bluebird Care.
The handset communicates via 2G (GSM, GPRS, EDGE) or 3G phone service, which the companies are offering as a bundled service (with data and voice plans) via the Vodafone, EE and O2 mobile service providers in the United Kingdom. The phone service plan typically costs approximately £14 ($21) per user, per month.
Gentag, a U.S. technology developer, designed the NFC handsets to operate as a stripped-down mobile phone that does not support the types of applications and other functionality that can be loaded onto most commercially available smartphones, according to John Peeters, Gentag's president and CEO. As such, they are targeted at workers who have specific tasks to complete that could benefit from using NFC tag reads to identify their location.
In the United Kingdom, Bluebird's health aides, like those working for similar care providers, make periodic visits to clients who are often elderly and unable to leave their home for doctors' visits. While this work was once performed by government personnel, it is now typically carried out by private contracting companies that must provide a close account of which services they provide, and to whom. For many years, says Chris Griffin, AHC's director of advanced mobile communications division, home visits were documented by means of landline phones. Staff members would arrive at a client's home, and then use that person's landline to call the office and report what they were doing.
This approach, however, has had its shortcomings. For instance, some clients do not want a worker to use their landline phones, due to concerns regarding toll costs. What's more, fewer clients actually have landlines in their homes these days, since a growing number depend solely on cell phones. What's more, the process of dialing out on a client's phone twice per visit was time-consuming. Therefore, AHS developed a solution that works with an NFC phone.
With an NFC tag attached to a wall inside a patient's home, and an NFC reader built into a health aide's handset, the aide could simply tap the phone near the tag upon beginning and completing a visit, and AHC's iConnect software on the phone would transmit that information, along with the tag's unique ID number, to the iConnect data-management software running on the user's back-end system. For example, AHC has provided home health-care companies with its StaffPlan Roster software system since 2007. The roster software indicates to workers which clients should be visited, and also tracks when those visits occur, based on staff reports. With iConnect, such reports can be made via NFC.
With the AHC-Gentag solution, each Bluebird health aide is issued a Gentag GT-602v2 cell phone, which comes with a built-in 13.56 MHz reader based on NXP Semiconductors' PN544 chip. This enables the phone to read passive 13.56 MHz tags compliant with the ISO 15693 and 14443 standards. The handset also comes with a camera, as well as Bluetooth and USB connectivity for synchronizing data.
Each Bluebird home health aide also carries an ID card containing an NFC RFID inlay—for an additional fee, AHC offers such cards as part of the iConnect solution—encoded with an ID number linked to that individual's identity in the iConnect software running on the user's back-end system. When making a home visit, the aide taps the phone's reader against the ID card, as well as against an NFC RFID tag mounted on a wall of the home (if requested, AHC also provides the home tags for an additional fee). Both ID numbers are forwarded to the back-end iConnect software, thus indicating where the worker is located. The iConnect software then pulls data from the roster software, in order to present the worker with a list (displayed on his or her phone) of tasks for that location, such as medications that individual should take, bathing or other services required, or food he or she should be eating.
Upon leaving the home, the worker again taps his or her phone against the tag, and responds to a dropdown menu by selecting prompts indicating the services provided. The aide can also utilize the handset to make a call or send a text message in order to report an exception, such as when a patient will not allow the worker inside the home, or if he or she notices a change in the client's health that should be addressed or merely watched. The aide can also take pictures—for example, if a patient has a wound for which the healing process needs to be chronicled.
Future versions of the iConnect software, AHC reports, will enable users to take advantage of geomapping that would allow them to identify where they are (via cell tower triangulation data supported by the iConnect software), and thus pinpoint the next client's address and obtain directions to that location. The software could also identify where an individual worker is, and thereby determine if, for example, he or she could respond to a last-minute call in the neighborhood.
Gentag commercially released its first handsets in the United Kingdom in June 2012. To date, AHS indicates, 145 of its home health-care service provider clients are using the technology, with 21,000 NFC-enabled handsets made by Nokia, Samsung or other phone manufacturers, as well as 4,000 from Gentag.
Since Gentag developed the phone for use with the iConnect app, the company has been approached by other home health-care firms wishing to use the handsets. AHC and Gentag are now offering a kit that includes Gentag's GT-601v2 NFC cell phone and iConnect software, to be used by care workers in North America and the United Kingdom. In the United States, Gentag has tested its phone with subscriber identity modules (SIMs) from AT&T, T-Mobile and Vodafone, though the company has yet to select a North American carrier for use with the iConnect software.
The GT-601v2, Peeters says, offers an alternative to smartphones that are not only costly but can pose a variety of distractions for personnel on the job. By deploying the Gentag solution, companies could expect employees to put their smartphones aside while working, and to simply use this NFC device enabling them to communicate with the home office, track a client's care, log in and out of each visit, take pictures, or place personal calls when needed—but not get distracted by social networking, games or other apps offered on their smartphone. In addition, Peeters notes, Gentag can also offer the GT-601v2 with custom-adapted firmware, as requested.
Although the solution targets home health care and is intended for sale to companies that might purchase the devices in high volume, Peeters says it also has a use case for more personal applications. This, he explains, includes enabling parents to acquire the phones for younger children, allowing them to alert their parents upon returning home from school, simply by tapping the phone against an NFC tag at the door. "We see so many markets for this," he states.
"We're really proud of our product," says Marc Bense, Gentag's general manager for Europe. "No other phone performs as well, especially for the NFC read performance and field-proven robustness." The phone can interrogate NFC RFID tags located up to nearly 10 centimeters (4 inches) away, he reports, while most NFC phones must be much closer to a tag before they can capture its data. The Gentag kits are available in quantities of 3,000 units or more during the initial offering, he says. In such volume, he adds, the phones will cost $99 apiece.
