Psychiatric patients monitoring using RFID: An affordable approach

Psychiatric wards in hospitals face the problems of patient absconding and this has caused great concern not only to the healthcare workers but also to the public to a certain extent. The standard and quality of healthcare services are compromised and the safety of public can be placed at risk. One of the main challenges is the high cost to hospitals to automate the tracking of patients. In this paper RFID-enabled solution was proposed to help monitor psychiatric patients to prevent them from absconding using off the shelf devices. A client-server using long polling and RFID readers were implemented in the set up. The approach was not only feasible and cost effective but also increased the value of health care practices in improving the workflow in the psychiatric wards and providing more opportunities in rehabilitation and personal care rather than spending time checking on the where about of the patients.