Development of an ease-of-use remote healthcare system architecture using RFID and networking technologies

The study aims to provide an ease-of-use approach for senior patients to utilize remote healthcare systems. An ease-of-use remote healthcare system (RHS) architecture using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and networking technologies is developed. Specifically, the codes in RFID tags are used for authenticating the patients' ID to secure and ease the login process. The patient needs only to take one action, i.e. placing a RFID tag onto the reader, to automatically login and start the RHS and then acquire automatic medical services. An ease-of-use emergency monitoring and reporting mechanism is developed as well to monitor and protect the safety of the senior patients who have to be left alone at home. By just pressing a single button, the RHS can automatically report the patient's emergency information to the clinic side so that the responsible medical personnel can take proper urgent actions for the patient. Besides, Web services technology is used to build the Internet communication scheme of the RHS so that the interoperability and data transmission security between the home server and the clinical server can be enhanced. A prototype RHS is constructed to validate the effectiveness of our designs. Testing results show that the proposed RHS architecture possesses the characteristics of ease to use, simplicity to operate, promptness in login, and no need to preserve identity information. The proposed RHS architecture can effectively increase the willingness of senior patients who act slowly or are unfamiliar with computer operations to use the RHS. The research results can be used as an add-on for developing future remote healthcare systems.