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I feel somewhat honored that www.veriwave.com, would publish my recent white paper from www.aami.org on their site. Thanks Veriwave! It is my belief that this is timely for the medical device industry to validate and use the "best of industry" tools to validate the application requirements.
This is a pretty good article that points out the ins and outs of WIFI RTLS systems for healthcare. From www.wirelessdesignmag.com
Download WiFi+Inadequate+as+Real-Time+Asset+and+Patient+Tracking+Solution
Or, as Andrian Jennings say, "Dazzling your Technical Staff with you in-depth knowledge." A good white paper that helps put a a lot of the technnology perspective out there. Again, for any RTLS solution to work it has to be everywhere, be cost effective, have low infrastructure costs, be easily and quickly deployed, and have sub-room accuracy.
The growing awareness of the need for ubiqutous public-safety in-building communicaton for police, fire, rescue, and emergency medical personnel has led to in-process legislation that will cover two aspects of this issue: the availability of sufficient bandwidth and communication channels to meet growing needs, and legal obligations by all high rise (over four floors), and large building owners to provide a Public Safety communication infrastructure in their building.
While I have seen a lot of venture capital go to technology, it is fair to say that today that the VC community wants and demands a significant track record of growth and marketplace dominance before investments are made. Have followed many RTLS companies since 1999, some are still here, some are gone, but basically not one of them has been able to have the right business model with the right technological solution. In the healthcare market to drive improvements in workflow and productivity the RTLS technology must be cost affordable, be deployed across the "entire enterprise", provide minimal disruption to the enterprise, and then give you "realiable sub room" accuracy.
Awarepoint Corporation Closes $13.3 M Series D Financing Round. - Cardinal Partners Leads Investment and is joined by Venrock in Expansion Capital for Principal Provider of Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS). - November 25, 2008
I have been around healthcare ( in all the clinical domains), medical devices, even in cardiac pacing/electrophysiology, and IT technology from the 80's and have witnessed from my days at Symbol Technologies 1999-2001, the advent of WIFI (802.11b), and the whole BCMA, Bar Code Medication Administration era, even early on with VoIP...essentially I was in the thick of this designing applications and well as engineering and deploying indoor and outdoor wireless deployments. Well today, we see 802.11b/g/a, forthcoming n, everywhere and people are getting real value from the applications (because the infrastructure is there and it is reliable..in most cases,) it all depends on a lot of variables of the competency of the designer and the actual installation. WIFI was deployed first in limited areas, not everywhere, but as costs came down, the value quotient for the need for pervasive mobility went up the food chain. It is now standard practice to light up the entire building, period. Now witness (DAS), distributed antenna systems. Companies like MobileAccess have gotten real traction because their active based design provided real value with multiple services...cost effectively. So at the end of the day, I would think that most institutions simply want and need pervasive WIFI coverage as well as inbuilding public safety, cellular, and PCS coverage. Just not why make this a standard design practice? You would not think of erecting a new building without centralized HVAC, why not make WLAN, Public Safety/PCS/Cellular a standard part of this architecture? Now switch to RTLS. Mentioning Symbol, I was there lock in step with WhereNet, and the early 802.11b (WIFI) RTLS tags from several companies. That was over eight years ago. Why is this not deployed in every single hospital across all care areas? It is my opinion that it is too expensive from the enteprise requirement (density of AP(s)), tag cost, and the in-ability to obtain sub-room accuracy (this is what you need in healthcare, not on on a factory floor). Only when you have the ability to know all the equipment, care givers, and patients within their care zone can you actually provide the ability to drive new process improvement. This cannot happen today unless you have pervasive coverage. I have witnessed all the other technology offerings, UWB, Zigbee, IR, Ultrasound, 900MHz. The real need today is for the RTLS technology for healthcare to be deployed "everywhere", across the healthcare enterprise, not just in a "department'...cost effectively without a ton of added WIFI infrastructure...it has to work down to sub-room accuracy, and work within the multi-path environment of healthcare. Then you can start driving all kinds of new work flow inprovement algorithms. I know this from first hand experience with my wife went into surgery a few weeks ago. They used ultrasound tags to track her from surgery to PACU, (this was great in one clinical domain) but I could not find her for about 30 minutes after she left PACU, because you guessed it they only deployed RTLS in surgery and PACU, not across the enterprise. Those RTLS companies that can provide the "holistic enterprise senses" in this model will be able to follow the footsteps of the pervasive WLAN model and now DAS model unfolding. See the latest enterprise testing model with www.veriwave.com for 802.11n. A lot of good information. Do not see anytime soon the need or requirement due to packet requirements for 802.11n for medical devices, however it may be of a benefit via DAS of MIMO for WMTS. (provide the diversity requirements to overcome multipath of which is not really present in current DAS solutions, without a lot of added cost). Power issues will be perhaps an issue for the mobility requirement, i.e. POE as described.
While a lot has been written around the technical requirements and needs in the wireless healthcare delivery model, the question also remains of "has a financial ROI been developed around the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), of the enterprise WLAN model?" What if the management in a real time model could be somewhat of a NOC (Network Operations Center) thus creating a flat model saving time and roll out to each facility?" How much savings and lowering of the risk analysis could this contribute to the bottom overall impact on productivity and improving the overall wireless and mobility experience ? These are questions that are not set in stone; but perhaps need to be explored to drive the next enterprise experienced wireless productivity value in the healthcare space. It is simply a works in progress, but also a huge opportunity to change the marketplace dynamics in light of our times and political space.
This article has been published this month for IT Horizons a publication of www.aami.org.
"Reprinted with permission from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumenation (AAMI), www.aami.org. The article first appeared in IT Horizons, 2008 edition."
Download 39_45_Technology_Hoglund.pdf
1. Maximum frame rates are up to be 2700% higher than 802.11g to drive substantial improvements in forwarding performance for VoIP and TCP flows.
2. Maximum bit rates are up to 800% higher than 802.11g, increasing network capacity by improving forwarding performance for large frames.
3. Extended range facilitates more clients per access point and ensure robust connectivity.
4. Improved service availability is enabling 802.11n to be the primary enterprise network instead of Ethernet.
5. Increased supply power is required to support multiple transmitters for MIMO schemes and for APs supporting concurrent 2.4 and 5GHz operation.
Veriwave, www.veriwave.com provides a comprehensive set of software applications and hardware modules. This includes and allows for such as rapid verification of WLAN and Ethernet functional behavior, negative testing, test methodologies that enable IEEE 802.11.2 benchmarking, roaming, TCP goodput, VoIP QoS via a GUI or script, and user quality experience metrics for stateful L4-7 traffic mixtures.
This is definitely a theoritic analysis but it is good to ramp up the educational value and understanding of this rapdily growing space. Also, you may desire to go to www.thedasforum.org to gain further insite.
