NFCARE

Possible Applications of NFC Technology in Sanitary Environments

Giuliano Benelli and Alessandro Pozzebon

Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Via Roma 56, Siena, Italy

Keywords:

NFC, RFID, Informative Systems, Electronic case history, Electronic medical prescription, Wireless Commu-

nication.

Abstract:

In this paper we discuss the introduction of the NFC technology in the management of the assistance opera-

tions in the hospitals. NFC is a new short range communication system based on RFID technology.

NFC systems can work like traditional RFID systems, where a master device reads some information from a

slave device, but they can also set up a two-way communication between two items. In particular, NFC devices

can be integrated on mobile phones, widely enhancing the intercommunication capabilities of the users.

The introduction of NFC in sanitary environments can help to make safer all the assistance operations. Next

to the realization of a NFC electronic case history, we also studied the realization of electronic medical pre-

scription and the use of this technology for the exchange of patient data between doctors and between nurses,

in order to avoid errors in the attendance operations.

The ﬁnal idea is to change a mobile phone into an interactive multipurpose assistant for people working in

hospitals or in harness with patients.

1 INTRODUCTION

The acronym NFC stands for Near Fields Communi-

cation and indicates a new communicationtechnology

directly deriving from RFID identiﬁcation systems.

Like many RFID systems, NFC works at the fre-

quency of 13.56MHz and is based on the physical

principle of inductive coupling.

The main difference between the two systems de-

rives from the fact that, while RFID is strictly an

identiﬁcation technology, NFC has been studied to be

properly used as a wireless communication technol-

ogy between devices brought to a short distance be-

tween them.

Nowadays many mobile devices producers are be-

ginning to realize phones and PDAs equipped with

NFC circuitry, also providing the software to realize

applications using this technology.

The main ﬁelds of application of NFC include

proximity payments, peer-to-peer communication and

obviously, strictly deriving from RFID, access con-

trol.

In sanitary environments RFID has found many

applications: one of these has been the managing and

the identiﬁcation of patients.

In particular an electronic case history located on

passive RFID bracelets has been studied and realized

in a previous work (Benelli, Parrino and Pozzebon,

2008), showing the beneﬁts deriving from the chance

to get vital information directly form the electronic

support, with a reduction of the times of assistance

and of the risks deriving from human errors.

The idea of this article is to show how much the

performances of RFID systems can be widen moving

to NFC technology, which can be used to execute the

same operations made by mobile RFID devices, but

adding many new functions once unfeasible.

2 NFC TECHNOLOGY

Before talking about how to introduce NFC in sani-

tary environments it’s important to describe its main

technological features.

It’s obviously impossible to speak about NFC without

brieﬂy introducing RFID, which represents a funda-

mental technological background.

In the second subsection are then described the main

characteristics of NFC communication protocol, in

order to understand the various ways of interaction

Benelli G. and Pozzebon A. (2009).

NFCARE - Possible Applications of NFC Technology in Sanitary Environments.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics, pages 58-65

DOI: 10.5220/0001546700580065

 SciTePress

between different devices.

2.1 The Origins: RFID

The technological structure of NFC systems is quite

the same as the one of RFID systems. NFC uses the

same physical principles and partly the same kind of

devices.

It’s therefore difﬁcult to understand the structure

and the possible uses of NFC with investigatinga little

the main features of Radio Frequency Identiﬁcation

technology.

RFID is an automatic identiﬁcation technology

which uses the electromagnetic ﬁeld as the mean of

identiﬁcation (Finzkeller, 2003). Usually RFID sys-

tems are composed by two devices: a Reader, which

generates the interrogating electromagnetic ﬁeld, and

the Transponder, which is located on the item to be

identiﬁed and returns back to the reader the ID (Iden-

tiﬁcation) code and the additional information.

When the Transponder comes inside the EM

(Electromagnetic) ﬁeld of the reader it can be inter-

rogated and it can send back the data using the same

ﬁeld.

There are many kinds of RFID systems, working

at different operativefrequencies. In particular we can

ﬁnd Low Frequency (125-135kHz), High Frequency

(13.56MHz), Ultra High Frequency (868-915MHz)

and Microwave (> 2GHz) systems.

Every different RFID application needs a particu-

lar care in the choice of the right technological solu-

tion: for example even if Ultra High Frequency sys-

tems can provide large read ranges, they have a lot of

problems od electromagnetic compatibility.

The same happens for the powering methods of

the transponders: in fact we can ﬁnd passive, active or

semipassive transponders, offering very different fea-

tures. While an active transponder can be read from a

distance ten times wider than a passive one, his higher

price can make it unsuitable in applications in which

the number of items to be identiﬁed is very high.

2.2 NFC Technological Features

NFC belongs to the family of RFID, but it has speciﬁc

technological features (Innovision, 2007).

It only works at the frequency of 13.56MHz, that

is an unregulated band. This means there aren’tany li-

censes required and restrictions concern only the elec-

tromagnetic emissions, in order to limit the impact of

the system on human body.

Differently from traditional RFID technology,

passive and active devices can be integrated into the

same system.

NFC can reach a maximum read range of around

20cm but common devices are not able to read from

distances larger than 4 or 5cm. The decision to create

products with low read ranges comes not only from

the physic limitations of the technology but also from

the fact that short ranges ensure a bigger protection

from outside intrusions. These requirements mainly

come from the aim to use NFC to implement proxim-

ity wireless payment systems.

NFC devices can currently communicate at three

different speeds, 106kbit/s, 212kbit/s and 424kbit/s

but in the future higher rates will be probably

achieved.

NFC protocol differentiates the device initiating

and controlling the communication, called Initiator

and the device answering the request from the initia-

tor, called Target (ECMA, 2007).

NFC protocol also presents two different opera-

tive modalities: a passive mode, with a single device

generating the ﬁeld and the other one using this ﬁeld

to exchange the data, and an active mode, in which

the two devices generate their own EM ﬁeld.

As a consequence NFC devices have studied to in-

tegrate on the same support the functions covered by

the Reader an the Transponder. This means that we

can have three different types of communication:

• The traditional communication protocol of RFID

systems, in which the NFC equipped device acts

as a Reader and it can get the information stored

onto a Transponder and can also write on it.

• A bidirectional communication, in which two

NFC devices exchange data between themselves.

This case is particularly interesting because, even

if the bit rates currently available are not too high,

the particular protocol implemented makes the es-

tablishing of the communication very easy.

• A communication between a turned on device and

a turned off one. In this case the second item

is seen by the ﬁrst one simply as a Transponder,

making it suitable for identiﬁcation and access

control purposes.

All these different methodologies of data ex-

change have brought to the realization of many kinds

of systems covering a wide range of applications not

only in the ﬁeld of identiﬁcation but also in the one of

personal communication.

Moreover, the short reading range of the devices

makes NFC systems considerably safe, because in-

truders should arrive too much close to the devices

to steal the data.

The large number of possible applications has ﬁ-

nally led to the integration of the NFC technology

onto the most common communication devices cur-

NFCARE - Possible Applications of NFC Technology in Sanitary Environments

rently available on the market: the mobile phones.

NFC phones can then be used as keys, credit cards

or business cards and the number of possible applica-

tions is virtually inﬁnite.

Figure 1: An NFC system.

3 NFC IN THE REAL WORLD

Even if quite new, NFC is a technology whose intro-

duction is supposed to be very fast. In this sense the

number of possible devices and applicative ﬁelds is

growing day by day, making necessary a deep knowl-

edge of the possible technological solutions.

In the following sections we describe brieﬂy the most

important typologies of NFC devices and the main ap-

plications.

The last subsection describes all the work that has

been made in order to create worldwide accepted stan-

dards for NFC systems.

3.1 NFC Devices

NFC systems can integrate three different kinds of de-

vices:

1. Fixed Read/Write or Read Only terminals;

2. Mobile Read/Write or Read Only devices;

3. Read Only Tags.

The ﬁxed terminal can be common RFID readers

working at 13.56MHz ISO14443 compliant or can be

speciﬁcally studied devices created to perform spe-

ciﬁc actions deriving from the particular operation

they have to execute.

Some examples of ad-hoc devices can be the NFC

POS systems or the electronic ticketing terminals.

Mobile devices are mainly represented by phones

or PDA, even if in this case too speciﬁc platforms can

be studied to satisfy particular requirements.

Many mobile phones producers, including big

companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola are

studying and realizing particular phones with NFC

technology integrated, and speciﬁc studies assert that

by the year 2010 half of all mobile devices will sup-

port NFC.

In particular, while many companies have begun

to sell speciﬁc versions of common phones equipped

with NFC infrastructure, Nokia has been the ﬁrst

brand to put on the market a totally NFC phone.

The last kind of devices is represented by Tags. In

this case common ISO14443 RFID tags can be used,

even if speciﬁc products have nevertheless been real-

ized.

Currently four different types of tag can be used

in NFC systems:

• Type 1 is based on ISO14443A, is produced only

by Innovision Research & Technology and has a

96-byte memory. This kind of tags are very cheap;

• Type 2 is based on ISO14443A, is produced only

by Philips (MIFARE UltraLight), and has only a

48-byte memory;

• Type 3 is based on FeLica (a speciﬁcation compat-

ible with the ISO18092 standard for passive com-

munication mode) and produced only by Sony.

These tags have higher memory capacities (up to

2 kbytes) and reach the 212kbit/s rate;

• Type 4 is compatible with the ISO14443A/B stan-

dard and is produced by several manufacturers.

It has a large addressing-memory capability and

reaches rates up to 424kbit/s.

These four kinds of tags represent four strongly

different products, and every time that an NFC appli-

cation has to be realized, the choice of the right kind

of tag has to been made extremely carefully.

3.2 NFC Applications

NFC can be used in several different ﬁelds. Three

different categories of possible applications havebeen

identiﬁed (Innovision, 2007):

• Service initiation;

• Peer-to-Peer;

• Payment and Ticketing.

In the ‘Service Initiation’ scenario NFC is used in

a way similar to RFID. The NFC device reads the ID

code or the saved data from a tag and uses them in

many different ways.

HEALTHINF 2009 - International Conference on Health Informatics

In this case the NFC reader can be a ﬁxed terminal

or a mobile device, while the Identiﬁcation device can

obviously be a transponder, but can also be a turned-

off mobile device. In fact the ID code of the internal

tag of NFC phones can be read even if the device is

off, allowing for example the use of the phone as an

electronic key.

The information retrieved from the transponder

(stored data or UID code) can be simply read and dis-

played, can be used to set up a connection (in this case

data can be a URL or a phone number) or can be used

for access control in the same way as RFID keys.

One example of this kind of applications can be

the ‘smart poster’. In this application an NFC tag is

located near an informative point: the user brings an

NFC phone near the tag, reads an URL stored on it

and uses it to connect to the Internet site providing

the information requested.

The ‘Peer-to-Peer’ category is something totally

different from RFID systems. In this kind of appli-

cations a two-way communication is set up between

two devices working in Active mode.

If the amount of data to be exchanged is not too

large this can be done using directly the NFC channel.

If the amount of data is too big (for example an im-

age), NFC channel can be used to set up another wire-

less connection (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi) in a way totally in-

visible to the user, and then send the data through this

connection.

In this case NFC is used exclusively to set up the

connection. For example in an Internet Point the user

can get the Wi-Fi settings touching a speciﬁc hot-spot

with the NFC terminal and then transfer them, also

with NFC, to the device to be connected to Internet.

The last scenario ‘Payment and ticketing’ is cur-

rently the most studied due to high the interest of

many banking companies in this technology (Smart

Card Alliance, 2007).

The idea is to turn a mobile phone in an electronic

wallet or in an electronic credit card. While nowadays

a card can be used for a single payment function, with

NFC will be possible to collect many different func-

tions on a single multimodal platform.

As we told before NFC is implicitly safe due to its

short ranges.

The possible payment operations can be divided

in two main groups: micro-payments and macro-

payments.

Micro-payments are represented by the electronic

wallet. An amount of virtual money is loaded onto

the phone and the user can pay various services like

tickets or car parks simply bringing the phone next to

payment terminal.

Macro-payments can be a little more complicated

because they necessarily involve the collaboration

with banks. In this case the phone will replace the

Credit Cards or Bancomats in payment operations

working with POS system. In macro-payments it’s

mainly used the identiﬁcation capability of NFC.

3.3 NFC Standards and Organizations

The high interest in NFC technology has brought

many companies, coming from very different busi-

ness areas, to join together into an organization called

NFC Forum (NFC Forum, 2007).

In particular the Forum is composed by manufac-

turers of devices, developers of applications and ﬁ-

nancial institutions. Among the most important we

can cite Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sony, Texas In-

struments, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, IBM, Master-

Card, Visa and AT&T, but the most important fact is

the the Forum has been joined by companies from all

over the world.

The forum has the main purpose to promote the

introduction of NFC technology in common appli-

cations on a worldwide scale and tries to do this by

proposing standard-based speciﬁcations, interopera-

ble solutions, and providingstable frameworks for ap-

plication development.

Being basically an RFID technology, NFC sys-

tems are compliant with the ISO14443 standard for

proximity cards used for identiﬁcation.

Next to this speciﬁc standards for NFC have been

developed. In particular the following standards have

been published:

• ISO18092: Near Field Communication - Interface

and Protocol - 1 (NFCIP-1): this standard basi-

cally speciﬁes the modulation schemes, coding,

transfer speeds and frame format of the RF inter-

face of NFC systems;

• ISO21481: Near Field Communication - Interface

and Protocol - 2 (NFCIP-2): this standard speci-

ﬁes the mechanism to detect and select the com-

munication mode out of the possible NFC com-

munication modes;

• ISO22536: Near Field Communication Interface

and Protocol (NFCIP-1) - RF Interface Test Meth-

ods: this standard deﬁnes the test methods for the

RF-interface of NFC systems;

• ISO23917: NFCIP-1 - Protocol Test Methods:

this standard complements the previous one and

speciﬁes the protocol tests;

• ISO28361: Near Field Communication Wired In-

terface (NFC-WI), this standard speciﬁes the dig-

ital wired interface between two components, a

NFCARE - Possible Applications of NFC Technology in Sanitary Environments

Transceiver and a Front-End, including the signal

wires, binary signals, the state diagrams and the

bit encodings for three data rates.

4 NFC IN SANITARY

ENVIRONMENTS

Even if currently the most studied application ﬁeld

regards the payment scenarios, the versatility of NFC

technology encourages its use in many other ﬁelds not

directly involved in commercial operations.

In particular the availability of common mobile

phones equipped with NFC hardware encourages its

wide use in applications with high interactivity and

security requirements.

In sanitary environments the assistance operations

usually involve a high number of actors, including

doctors, nurses and obviously patients. Moreover

all these operations require a high level of reliabil-

ity in the interaction among different people because

a wrong medical prescription can cause big problems

to the patients while in the assistance operations in

Emergency Rooms 5 minutes can make the difference

between life of death.

The informative and communicative capabilities

of NFC can be therefore used to reduce all the er-

rors or misunderstandings deriving from wrong data

exchanges or from slow information access.

If the NFC Forum predictions on NFC devices dif-

fusion will demonstrate to be true in the next years

many people all over the world will be provided with

NFC devices and, due to the standardization of the

technology, simply downloading a speciﬁc software

on their phone they will be able to access at some ser-

vices modeled on the needs of their particular working

environment.

The ﬁnal idea is to turn the personal mobile phone

of doctors and nurses into a multipurpose device join-

ing the personal uses with the common working ac-

tivities of these categories of people. The phone may

therefore become a key, a pen, a sheet of paper, an

organizer and, obviously, a communication device.

In the speciﬁc case of sanitary environments we

studied and developed a set of applications deriving

from the ﬁrst two applicativeﬁelds, i.e. Service initia-

tion an Peer-to-Peer because the Payment and Ticket-

ing ﬁeld is evidently more distant than these two from

the speciﬁc needs of an hospital.

Figure 2: NFC applications in sanitary environment.

4.1 Service Initiation Applications in

Sanitary Environments

Service Initiation doesn’t mean only identiﬁcation or

access control. In this applicativeﬁeld are included all

the applications which use transponders as contactless

memories to be read from mobile or ﬁxed devices.

What can be read is not only the UID code of

the transponder, but also the information stored on it,

which can be codiﬁed in order to use in the best pos-

sible way the small amount of memory available, and

can be ciphered in order to make it unreadable from

external users.

Taking care of patients means the performing of

a lot of different activities, from the care of wounded

people in the Emergency Room to the administration

of medicines. Some of these activities can be made

safer an faster with the use of NFC phones as reader

devices.

In particular the following applications have been

studied and developed:

• Access control: entrance in reserved areas and

tracking of the working hours of employees;

• Electronic case history;

• Electronic communication of assistance opera-

tions;

• Electronic medical prescriptions.

The ﬁrst application is evidently the closest to the

original target of RFID, the automatic Identiﬁcation.

In fact, as we said before, NFC phones can be identi-

ﬁed from NFC readers exactly as transponders, even

when they are turned off.

HEALTHINF 2009 - International Conference on Health Informatics

This allows to use phones as key to obtain access

to restricted areas in the same way as magnetic strip

cards. Moreover, the phone can be used to record the

accesses and the exits from the working place, a func-

tion currently managed in italian hospitals with cards.

In this case the main advantage derives from the

incorporation of these functions on the mobile device,

preventing the employees to bring with them the re-

quested cards.

The Electronic Case History application derives

from a previously studied similar system based on

RFID technology (Benelli, Parrino and Pozzebon,

2008).

In many assistance operations the quickness of in-

tervention is one of the most important features to be

achieved. Next to this there are some vital informa-

tion concerning the patient that must be provided to

the doctor before performing the intervention: data

like blood type, allergies or vaccines are fundamental

to avoid dangerous errors.

One of the best ways to ensure a correct and fast

reading of the information is to store them into an

electronic device and retrieve it with a multimedia

support. In this sense the idea is to provide to pa-

tients an electronic bracelet concerning mainly of an

NFC transponder, where data can be stored and read

quickly with a phone in case of need.

Obviously NFC transponder cannot store large

amounts of data. As a consequence a severe choice

has to be made between strictly vital information,

which has necessarily to be provided to the doctor and

will be then kept directly on the bracelet, and less im-

portant data, like for example the chronologyof all the

medical interventions made on a patient, which can be

stored into a remote database and then retrieved only

on request using Wi-Fi, GPRS or UMTS connection

(Bing, 2002).

Even if our application has been studied and tested

using MIFARE 4K transponders, which provide a 4

kbyte EEPROM, we studied an organization of the

information to make it storable also into 256 byte

transponders.

This is the bytes subdivision chosen in our appli-

cation:

• 40 bytes for ﬁrst name and family name;

• 16 bytes for the tax code, whose decoding allows

the recoverof birth date, place of birth and gender;

• 10 bytes for the sanitary code;

• 8 bytes for allergies: every byte is a ﬂag indicat-

ing the presence/absence of the corresponding al-

lergy;

• 8 bytes for vaccines: every byte is a ﬂag indi-

cating the presence/absence of the corresponding

vaccine;

• 8 bytes for infectious diseases: every byte is a

ﬂag indicating the presence/absence of the corre-

sponding disease;

• 8 bytes for various information like blood type

(1 byte encoding), HIV positivity or smoking/non

smoking;

• 100 bytes with a speciﬁc codiﬁcation for the 10

last hospitalizations. Every hospitalization is cod-

iﬁed with 10 bytes where the ﬁrst to bytes are a

code corresponding to the speciﬁc medical ward,

the third and the fourth indicate the kind of inter-

vention and the last six bytes are the date;

• 50 bytes for textual accessory information.

Once the NFC device is brought in proximity of

the bracelet, it reads the string of bytes, decodes it

and shows the data into a graﬁc interface. It also gets

the UID code of the tag in order to use it as the identi-

ﬁcation mean to retrieve the information stored inside

a remote database.

The application which manages the reading, de-

coding, recover and reproduction of the information

is a Java Midlet, also incorporating simple read and

write tag functions.

These functions will be used in the third appli-

cation, in which transponders are seen as the means

to communicate the type of assistance operations per-

formed on a speciﬁc patient.

The idea is that every bed in the hospital will be

equipped with a transponder. Every time that an inter-

vention is made, before performing the operations the

doctor or the nurse reads on the transponder the pre-

vious treatment made to the patient, in order to avoid

dangerous errors like repetitions in drug administra-

tion.

After the assistance has been made the operation

performed is written on the transponder with the NFC

phone, in the same way as are written SMSs, in or-

der to inform the ones who will make the following

intervention.

In the last application we studied the realization

of an electronic medical prescription where sheets of

paper are replaced with transponders.

The technological infrastructure is the same of the

former task, allowing then to incorporate its function-

alities into the same software developed for all the

other applications.

Instead of writing the medical prescription on a

paper, the doctor writes it into a transponder in the

same SMS way of the other application. Usually the

length of a prescription is less than 200 characters so

usually there are no problems of shortage of memory.

NFCARE - Possible Applications of NFC Technology in Sanitary Environments

Anyway 4kbyte cards can be used in order to avoid

any risk of incomplete descriptions.

Once the prescription has been written the

transponder can be brought to the chemist who can

read it with its own NFC phone.

In many cases handwritten medical prescriptions

are very difﬁcult to be read: such a kind of sys-

tem will help to avoid errors in the administration of

medicines, making safer the treatment of patients.

Figure 3: Electronic case history - allergies and electronic

medical prescription.

4.2 Peer-to-Peer Applications in

Sanitary Environments

As described before the Peer-to-Peer scenario is the

one in which the most interesting innovations are in-

troduced.

The phone is in fact used as a short range com-

munication device allowing people to exchange data

simply bringing close to them their mobile phones.

The absence of direct interaction from the users to set

up the communicationchannel makes very fast the be-

ginning of the process of information exchange.

This functionality can be joined with the system

described in the previous section in order to make the

information about patients retrieved with the reading

of the electronic bracelets transferable among the peo-

ple operating around a speciﬁc patient.

In fact, usually many different people attend at the

assistance of people in a hospital, and in some cases

the operations can last even some hours.

Every time that a doctor replaces another one

he can download the electronic case history simply

bringing his phone close the one of the former doctor.

This operation can be performed for every kind of

data that has to be exchanged between two different

employees.

For example a doctor can download from a re-

mote server a particular information about a patient

like an image of an x-ray and then he can send it to all

the other doctors operating with him simply using the

NFC channel.

As described before, if the amount of information

to be exchanged is too big to be transferred with NFC,

this technology can be used to set up a connection in a

fast way with other technologies like Bluetooth which

can then be used as the real transfer channel.

Figure 4: Phone menu interface.

4.3 NFC Devices used in the Realization

of the System

The devices used in the realization of this study are a

mobile phone provided with an ad-hoc development

kit, a set of transponders and a reader.

The mobile phone used is a Nokia 6131 NFC: it’s

a particular version of the common 6131 phone with

the NFC circuitry embedded. Nokia sells this product

in a particular ‘Experimental’ version, which allows

the developers to use all the features of the telephone

without the need to validate their applications.

Moreover Nokia provides a Java Development Kit

with all the APIs needed to realize NFC Midlet and

with a Simulation Environment which can be used to

test the applications but can also work as an emulated

phone interacting through a NFC reader, connected to

the computer, with an external phone.

The Simulation Environment also provides some

different simulated transponders in order to fully test

several kinds of applications.

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In the real testing phase we used MIFARE

transponders of different types. In particular we used

a MIFARE UltraLight transponder, which is very thin

(like a sheet of paper), but it has a small memory (only

512 bit), and a MIFARE 4k, which is thicker but can

store up to 4 kbytes of data. Both these transponders

are ISO 14443 compliant.

Finally we used a common RFID reader to study

the access control application because, once turned

off, the phone is read like a common RFID transpon-

der and no speciﬁc hardware is requested.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

The aim of this work was to show how much NFC

technology can increase the quality of service in situ-

ations very distant from the standard payment scenar-

ios.

The performances of NFC systems have proved to

be extremely high for what concerns the reliability of

the communication channel.

During the reading of the transponder no error has

been recorded, especially in the case of the electronic

case history, which involved the largest amount of

data to be moved.

In addiction the reading and decoding of the data

took only some fractions of second, making the in-

formation immediately available when the phone was

brought in proximity of the transponder.

The modularity of this system, due to the fact that

single tasks can be easily integrated into the same

software, makes it upgradeablesimply adding the new

functions to the underlying structure.

Among new applications to be studied we can ﬁnd

some ones deriving from already existing RFID sys-

tems, but now made simpler from the presence of mo-

bile phones. In particular we can list the following

ﬁelds:

• The identiﬁcation between mother and baby with

the use of transponders located onto the cradles or

with electronic bracelets.

• The tracking and identiﬁcation of blood sacks.

• The assistance operations inside the ambulance,

which can be made safer using the traditional

GPRS and UMTS connections available on mo-

bile phones.

Next to these in many other situations NFC can

be used to increase the level of reliability without the

need to enlarge the number of devices to be bought.

This fact is extremely important because in many

cases the introduction of a new service is prevented

due to the high costs.

The only expenses to be made to introduce such

a system are basically the ones for the mobile phone

and for the readers to control the accesses, because

currently transponders can be bought with few euro

cents, making this expense virtually unimportant.

If the NFC Forum valuations will demonstrate to

be true, in the next years we will see a vast diffusion of

NFC phones, making the applications described be-

fore simply downloadable and executable on the per-

sonal phones of doctors and nurses, without the need

to buy speciﬁc devices.

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