Dec 15
2020
Improving Healthcare With Near Field Magnetic Induction
By Seth Freedman, CEO, Intelligent Observation.
Motivating healthcare workers to follow proper hand hygiene compliance guidelines is the number one way to reduce the spread of infections in hospitals, according to both the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO).
In healthcare environments, effectively monitoring hand hygiene compliance has to move past visual observation, which only captures less than 2% of the hand hygiene compliance events in a 24/7/365 hospital. In order to capture most hand hygiene events, a device needs to be worn on the human body.
Challenges with Radio-Frequency Identification
For over a decade, the hand hygiene monitoring solutions on the market have relied on Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Not only does this technology require intricate infrastructure installation, but based on simple physics, it is also ineffective at monitoring the WHO Five Moments of Hand Hygiene to tracking infection spread in a healthcare setting.
Devices with RFID present one main challenge if expected to be worn on the body. RFID does not accurately transmit through water, and given that human bodies are made up of up to 60% water, the technology becomes highly inaccurate when it is worn on the person.