RFID, GPS Technoloyg and Electronic Surveillance

Residents at Assisted Living Community Tracked Using RFID Real-Time Locating System

Technology allows Rockhill Mennonite to track its residents and employees in real time, enabling documentation of patients' activities and care.

March 17, 2010

RFID Journal - Rockhill Mennonite Community, a continuing-care retirement compound located in Sellersville, Penn., has adopted a real-time location system (RTLS) enabling management to know when residents require assistance, to know where patients and workers are located at any given time, and to trace back the care residents have received, and the activities in which they participated. It also allows staff members to receive an alert when residents may be straying toward an area considered off-limits, such as an exit.

The organization installed the system one year ago at its assisted-living facility, then decided, last month, to deploy it at its nursing home as well. The system consists of a software application called InSites Enterprise Visibility Platform, provided by Intelligent InSites, as well as RFID hardware from CenTrak ...

About 175 battery-powered infrared (IR) location beacons are deployed throughout the nursing home and assisted-living facilities. Each beacon transmits its unique ID number over an IR signal that is then received by any of the CenTrak hybrid active 900 MHz RFID and infrared IT-710 pendant tags used by the staff, as well as the IT-720 tags utilized by residents, that are in the vicinity. The tag transmits that location beacon's ID number via RFID, along with its own unique ID, to one of the 26 readers installed on the sites. The readers receive that information and forward it to the back-end system via an Ethernet cable. It also sends an acknowledgement back to the tag, via RF.

In the software, the tag's location is calculated based on the IR beacon's ID number, and is linked to such resident data as his or her name and photo. The software can be customized for each resident to create specific perimeters, such as sending an alert if a particular individual reaches a specific location (an exit, for example), in the case of someone who has a tendency to wander. In this way, the resident need not have his or her movement restricted, because employees know they will receive an alert if that individual moves beyond an acceptable area.

If a resident calls for help by pressing the tag button, the alert status and the tag's location are transmitted to the reader, which again forwards that information to the software. The software then sends the data to staff members' PDAs or pagers, thereby alerting them that a resident requires assistance. The software also provides a map view of the facility, with an icon representing each staff member and resident as he or she moves around the compound, and can highlight the person with the alert status, so that workers can head to that specific location ...

The system also enables Rockhill Mennonite to show residents' family members what their loved ones' activities have been, since it tracks when each resident goes to any specific room—such as the activity or lunch room. If, for instance, a resident says she has not left her room for days, the staff can provide a record detailing exactly where and when she went, or confirm that she, indeed, did not leave her room during that span of time.

Because the system is Web-based, Sawatsky says he can also view data from the system on his iPhone, by logging into the system and entering the proper password.

Real-Time Location Solution Enables Retirement Community to Elevate the Standard of Care and Safety Provided to Their Residents

February 18, 2010

Intelligent Insites - Intelligent InSites, Inc., announced today that Rockhill Mennonite Community (Rockhill), a continuing care retirement community located in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, has implemented the InSites Enterprise Visibility Platform™ as the core of its resident care & safety solution. The innovative “indoor positioning system” offered by Intelligent InSites integrates real-time location sensing hardware provided by CenTrak and communication devices, such as pagers and PDAs, to monitor movement throughout the community and provides accurate and instant location information to enhance the level of care, services, and safety.

Each resident is provided a small pendant, which allows them to request assistance from anywhere in the facility by simply pressing a button on the pendant. The assistance request instantly alerts staff of the resident’s name, photo, and precise location. Requests for assistance are also delivered automatically on the residents behalf should the solution sense a potentially troublesome situation, such as entering a restricted area or spending an inordinate amount of time without movement.

Additionally, the software provides, updated in real-time, a map view of the facility with an icon for representing each staff member, resident, or even equipment, as they move around the facility. This way staff can head to that specific location without any delay, a tremendous improvement over traditional nurse call systems, which rely on the residents to activate alerts and do not provide their current location. The InSites solution also supports inputs and alerts from other systems, such as fall prevention, access control, or healthcare information systems, to be delivered through the InSites mobile workflow engine so the critical information is provided immediately to the right caregiver regardless of where they may be ...

About CenTrak

CenTrak is a leading provider of precise, adaptable, and cost-effective tracking solutions for healthcare facilities. The patented InTouchCare™ Real Time Location System (RTLS) infrastructure uniquely combines Gen2IR and active RFID technologies to deliver certainty-based or error free data, a requirement for workflow and other important applications. As the only predominantly battery-powered RTLS network, it has attained an ease and cost effective level of installation previously unattainable. InTouchCare is currently operating in millions of square feet of several world-class healthcare sites in the United States.