Intelligent Technologies for Self-Sustaining, RFID-Based, Rural e-Health Systems

The paper states that community-based healthcare is increasingly important for the well-being of inhabitants of emerging economies. The community model is needed partly because roads are less developed, limiting patients ability to commute from distant villages to central medical facilities. Also, developing countries have a large rural population base. Some estimates are that rural agriculture employs 75% of the population in developing countries.The goal of an RFID-backed community healthcare solution is to enable easy and reliable identification of individual patients, maintain more accurate medical records, facilitate better healthcare, and enhance the quality of life in communities that are remote from a central medical facility. In addition, it can also help to relieve the workload pressure on the central medical facility when it is overcrowded and can increase revenue opportunities by broadening the base of patients to include more remote locations. It may also help to improve the efficiency of the central medical facility, allowing it to focus resources on cases that require more specialized attention and care.