Leveraging complex event processing for smart hospitals using RFID

RFID technology has been examined in healthcare to support a variety of applications such as patient identification and monitoring, asset tracking, and patient-drug compliance. However, managing the large volume of RFID data and understanding them in the medical context present new challenges. One effective solution for dealing with these challenges is complex event processing (CEP), which can extract meaningful events for context-aware applications. In this paper, we propose a CEP framework to model surgical events and critical situations in an RFID-enabled hospital. We have implemented a prototype system with the proposed approach for surgical management and conducted performance evaluations to test its scalability and capability. Our study provides a feasible solution to improve patient safety and operational efficiency for an RFID-enabled hospital, by providing sense and response capability to detect medically significant events. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.