Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
While it's relatively easy to qualify the tags and readers used in the hospitals (eg to track surgical instruments and medical devices) and in the longer term to establish standards for devices' resistance to EMI caused by qualified tags, what about tags brought into hospitals by patients and visitors? Examples include public transport smartcards and inventory control tags on gifts. People are used to switching off their phones when in hospitals, but RFID tags can't be deactivated that easily, if at all.
Since the hazardous interference detected in the tests occurred when the tags were at a median distance of 30cm (less than 12in) from the equipment, the risk seems slight and there is little likelihood of a rash of patient fatalities. But the research does sound a warning that the the manufactures of medical equipment should harden their designs against external interference.
The research was carried out at the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
