Developing Local Association Network Based IoT Solutions for Body Parts Tagging and Tracking

Introduction

Traditional Internet commonly is wired with machine to machine persistent connections. Evolving towards mobile and wireless pervasive networks, Internet has to entertain dynamic, transient, and changing interconnections. The vision of the Internet of Things furthers technology development by creating interactive environment where smart objects are connected and can sense and react to the environment. The resulted event flooding in such Internet of Things (IOT) environment has aroused interest in research in network architecture and topologies where the events can be filtered to meet event intensive application requirements. In this paper, we will introduce a local association network (LAN) with a coordinated P2P message delivery mechanism. This LAN is tested and validated as suitable building block for the Internet of Things.

Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) as a promising technology to revolutionize the things to be identified and managed, has shown great potentials and has demonstrated good competitiveness in improving visibility on things or items to be managed. The identification power of RFID has been observed from tagging the Internet of Things to human bodies. Possible use of RFID to tag body parts donated to science was already discussed in 2005 (Associated Press, 2005). To combat theft of donated body parts, RFID was considered to put in cadavers that can then be read by a handheld device. The U.S. Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) and health officials in Mississippi's Harrison County were reported to implant human cadavers with RFID chips to help identify victims of Hurricane Katrina. In Louisiana, it is also expected to begin using the RFID systems to help officials cope with the estimated 500 unidentified bodies in that state (Kanellos, 2005).

In Hong Kong, there is an increasing interest in tagging human body to help manage the body or body parts either in a hospital or a mortuary. University medical school laboratories are also looking into this potential technology to help track and manage their laboratory body part assets in their everyday operation trainings. Is RFID a feasible candidate in such environment? How shall RFID technology be deployed in such environment? a key value indicators approach is proposed for performing value analysis in RFID adoption (Luo et al., 2008). The key value indicators serve as value metrics to evaluate perceived value from different adoption parties. The key value indicators for RFID technology adoption in body tagging would then relate to metrics indicating its value whether the body parts visibility can translate into actions to improve laboratory operation efficiency and to reduce cost. While the value promised by the RFID technology is eminent, the adoption level very much counts on the perceived value by the potential adoption parties – the labs, hospital, and many others.

There are a number of challenges in the value perceived by various stakeholders regarding operational efficiency in respect of body parts visibility, including:

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  Functions of medical school training operations are highly fragmented, associating with a very large number of individual training laboratories. Very often they have their own training operation processes. The proliferation of diversified operation processes, if overlooked, makes it difficult for operational efficiency evaluation for RFID adoption in body part tagging.

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  There is a lack of quality and consistent information on laboratory training operations (especially from RFID technology experts and laboratory management), leading barriers for setting focus on tackling body parts visibility. This makes it hard to identify how efficient of training operations. This makes it difficult to establish trends, make comparisons and manage cost with respect of RFID adoption in body part tagging.

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  Limited information and mechanisms are available for reviewing training operational effectiveness. This would lead to limited adoption scrutiny and cross-checking for operational efficiency and costs savings with respect of RFID adoption in body parts tagging.

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  There is a lack of procedures and methodologies in adopting RFID in body part tagging in medical school operation training laboratories, putting cost penalty for the lack of information visibility of body parts. This would result in great barriers in providing greater responsiveness in the provision of laboratory operation training services.