By Healthcare Facilities Today

Electronic infant protection is a widely adopted technology to prevent abduction and mother/infant mismatches. Most hospitals offering maternal childcare services are using this advanced RFID smart tag technology. A shift is now taking place from an older generation of systems that use proprietary RF protocols to those that use the existing Wi-Fi network to track infants all over the hospital, according to an article on the FacilityCare website.

The ability to see the infant anywhere covered by Wi-Fi – right down to the parking garage – dramatically expands the range of possibilities for deploying and using infant protection solutions, the article said.

According to the article, the current strategy is to build a perimeter around the OB unit. All exits are protected and infants are continually monitored inside the zone. Beyond this area there is no visibility, since covering the whole hospital is prohibitively expensive.

With a Wi-Fi-based solution, the current location of the infant can be monitored in real time based on signals received from the hospital’s standard Wi-Fi access points, the article said. With this  information, the nursing staff can go to any computer and find out where the infant is. 

Read the article.