In addition, has the technology been utilized for analyzing the use of buildings?
—Name withheld
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To answer this question, I turned to Paul Prince, RFID Journal‘s executive editor, who assigns all of our news stories. Paul points out that many real-time location systems deployed at hospitals are designed to track the flow of patients and employees, and to analyze the use of buildings in order to improve operations and workflow.
Here are links to some articles that might be relevant to your question:
• Bangalore Heart Center Uses Passive RFID Cards to Track Outpatients
• Providence Health Center Calls Its RFID System an ‘Eye-Opener’
• Sao Paulo Cancer Hospital Uses RFID to Respond to Heart Attacks
• Australia’s Bendigo Health Improves Efficiency Through RFID
• Massachusetts General Uses RFID to Better Understand Its Clinics
• Italian Hospital Uses RFID to Document Patient Location, Treatment
• At Virginia Mason Clinic, RFID Eliminates the Need to Wait
In addition, a group of researchers at the University of Washington outfitted a six-story building with 30 EPC Gen 2 readers in 2008, in order to track students and staff members (see University Launches RFID People Tracking Experiment). Although a primary goal of the project was to determine if there were any privacy risks, the participants used the location data to pinpoint colleagues within the building; to locate misplaced personal items, such as cell phones, PDAs, books and backpacks; and to improve their personal time management, by reviewing how and where they spent their time during each day.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal