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Medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and those developing apps for healthcare products have been gaining interest in Near Field Communication (NFC)-based technologies to provide automated, wireless and autonomous solutions. With that in mind, the NFC Forum recently held a webinar focused on healthcare use cases now being deployed or tested, to educate potential end users and solution providers.
Stefan Genser
Presenters for the webinar, titled "Exploring the Future of Healthcare with Innovations in NFC Technology," indicated some of the innovation and testing of technology using NFC ranges from smart bandages and wearable sensors to capturing information from devices such as glucose meters. That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg for NFC opportunities in the healthcare market, according to the NFC Forum.
Stefan Genser, the chair of the NFC Forum's healthcare task force and a sales director at Identiv, said companies are looking at NFC use for pharmaceutical authentication, to provide consumers with prescription information with the tap of a smartphone, or to let them access sensor data via NFC transmissions to indicate the conditions to which a product has been exposed. Sensor data can also display how much product remains within a medicine bottle or other container.
The NFC Forum is an industry association comprising approximately 300 member organizations, including technology and solutions companies. The organization presents webinars related to specific applications and markets based on the interests of its members, according to Mike McCamon, the NFC Forum's executive director. In the past months, McCamon says, members have been asking about the use of NFC technology transmitting at 13.56 MHz, compliant with ISO 14443 and 15693, in the healthcare market. Therefore, he adds, the Forum has been seeking to identify how the NFC industry can solve healthcare challenges.
NFC for Medical Devices and Wearables
A shortage of healthcare professionals in the market continues to drive the demand for automation technologies. As such, STMicroelectronics has been developing solutions for connected, consumer-friendly applications in the healthcare market, said Tania Guidet, the company's NFC product marketing director, during the webinar.
Mike McCamon
One use case that the company is developing employs NFC technology to transmit measurement data from a medical device to a smartphone so that a patient's information could then be managed or shared with a physician. The company also provides IC products for setting medical device parameters with a smartphone, and for conducting maintenance on medical equipment to identify causes of failure. Additionally, Guidet said, NFC technology could be used to charge small devices like hearing aids.
John Rogers, a Northwestern University professor and director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bionanotechnology, discussed a vital signs monitoring solution currently being developed by researchers, that will be wireless and require only flexible NFC-enabled sensors attached to the skin of pre-mature babies. With this solution, healthcare providers will be able to track a neonatal patient's heart rate, heart rate variability and oxygen levels, without requiring that a baby be wired to machinery.
Tania Guidet
"The vision is to replace wire-based solutions with very thin, skin-like sensors that produce the same measurements," Rogers said, which could be laminated to the body. The solution includes a wireless charging device built into the furniture where a baby is being cared for, which transmits NFC signals to power the sensors.
Vincent Bouchiat, Grapheal's CEO and co-founder, described diagnostic solutions that use NFC technology with biosensors. For instance, he said, Grapheal has built an interface via NFC between a health sensor or meter and a smartphone, enabling users to wirelessly capture health data with a single IC using a system-on-chip (SoC) on both the sensor and reader sides of the solution. In that way, a system could utilize glucose meters and an NFC connection to identify when a diabetic patient's sugar levels were a cause for concern, for instance.
The French company also makes "smart bandages" that detect the presence of fluid and can thereby transmit a patient's wound-healing status. The company has built a solution for COVID-19 antigen testing, by which an NFC-enabled test could forward the positive or negative results to a smartphone, enabling users to store test results and present them upon entering certain areas requiring a negative test result.
New Standard for NFC Healthcare Communication
Those building NFC solutions for healthcare applications must follow the ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards related to communication between devices or tags. The standard is aimed at enabling interoperability of medical applications for citizen-related medical, healthcare and wellness devices. It is referred to as the Personal Health Device (PHD) protocol, a framework intended to ensure compliance with that open standard. Medical device manufacturers and other developers can provide connected healthcare tools, then write apps for use of the data being collected over the PHD protocol.
John Rogers
This, according to the NFC Forum, is a sign of wireless technology being more universally adopted in healthcare. About 15 years ago, Genser says, the market looked very different. "There was a barrier in the healthcare industry to get from wired to wireless products," he explains. The medical industry tends to take a conservative approach to adopting new technologies, Genser notes, but the benefits are beginning to outweigh some previous concerns, while open standards make the technology easier to adopt.
Vincent Bouchiat
The benefits of NFC over other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or UHF RFID include the low cost of infrastructure requirements. According to Genser, nearly everyone already has an NFC reader in their hands, in the form of a smartphone, and NFC tags do not require a power source, further reducing deployment costs. The association, Genser says, has witnessed several areas of growth early into healthcare innovation for the technology. That includes the use of NFC in drug-administration devices to ensure the correct cartridge is used for the right patient.
Another use case being adopted or tested, Genser reports, is the application of NFC tags to medications to prevent counterfeiting. The black market continues to produce fake products, including counterfeit pharmaceuticals, he explains. Authentication via QR codes or bar codes is limited, however, because that technology can be more easily cloned. "You need a technology like NFC," he states, "where you can more or less combine the encrypted data on the chip with your smartphone data," which is only accessible to authorized parties.
In addition to authenticity, tags on drugs can link users to other data, such as expiration dates or recalls, and could be accessible to patients via their phones. "I think we're at the very beginning of the story [of NFC for healthcare]," McCamon says, "because I don't think everyone understands all the capabilities beyond payments." But based on member interest and use cases provided at the webinar, he predicts that the development of NFC solutions will continue to grow.
Key Takeaways:
- The NFC Forum webinar presented some of the many NFC-based solutions being innovated for the healthcare market.
- Technology developers, medical device makers and drug companies are investigating or deploying NFC systems that fill gaps created by reduced labor.
