Link: The Health Care Blog: TECH: The evolution of wireless in hospitals.
Now that cell phones and Wi-fi have proven to be safe and essential for health care facilities, there's a race on to get signals into those buildings. This is proving to have some interesting possibilities, but is also bringing some technical challenges to hospital technology managers. Frequently buildings are too dense to allow good cell phone signal, while increased demand for Wi-fi and VOIP is putting pressure on the ad-hoc Wi-fi networks being built up in many hospitals. One solution gaining traction is to locate PCS, cellular and paging, and Wi-fi services centrally and create a series of ceiling-based transmitters to amplify and distribute the various signals.
...[Technology companies] are developing the ability to track patients, products and equipment in a cost-effective real time manner using the Wi-fi network--an always-on alternative to RFID which works sort of like an “indoors GPS” ... by ... deploying tracking tags on people and equipment, and the size and price of those tags is falling rapidly.
Given the problems hospitals have locating their staff, patients and other movable parts, expect this technology to spread rapidly.
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