CenTrak Introduces World’s Thinnest Active RFID Tag
Newtown, PA, 2009 — CenTrak, a leading provider of Real-Time Locations Systems (RTLS) for tracking equipment and people indoors, today introduced its new IT-740 Staff Badge, the world’s thinnest hybrid active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag currently on the market. The Staff Badge is so thin it is almost indistinguishable from a standard employee badge. Despite the thin size, the Staff Badge doesn’t compromise on key CenTrak features such as certainty-based location accuracy, healthcare oriented delivery, or extreme battery life.
At three millimeters (3 mm) thin, the Staff Badge size allows hospitals and healthcare facilities to layer a standard personnel badge on top of the tag, enabling them to be seamlessly integrated into staff uniforms and hospital operations.
“In the past, providing staff location required employees to wear a tag designed for equipment, with its own separate method of attachment,” said Ari Naim, Ph.D., president and CEO of CenTrak. “This led to low compliance, limited staff location visibility, and missing RTLS data that impacted overall system reliability. The new CenTrak Staff Badge hangs almost invisibly on the same lanyard fastener as the employee’s hospital identification badge, thus insuring the badges are worn by everyone and providing complete staff location visibility.”
Features of the new IT-740 staff badge include, three programmable buttons, system controlled LED, hole mounts for portrait or landscape orientation, water resistance for easy cleaning, and ultra long battery-life.
CenTrak’s InTouchCare RTLS differs from legacy technologies in its combined use of a patented new generation of Infrared (Gen2IR) and RFID. A monitor transmits the unique room number using Gen2IR which is received by any tag in that room. The tag communicates the room number and its own unique ID via RF to the InTouchCare Location Server through an antenna using a hospital’s existing wired or Wi-Fi network, where it can be accessed in real-time by hospital personnel. Like light, Gen2IR will not pass through walls and it does not suffer from traditional IR line-of-sight limitations. Therefore, when a tag reads a room number, there are no errors. This is certainty-based RTLS. Monitors are positioned where location data is needed including, rooms, hallways, even bays, and are battery powered (over five years battery life) so installation is quick and easy. Estimated location based on RF triangulation can be used as a secondary means of RTLS in areas where there is no need for room or sub-room level location data. The Location Server can be integrated with Asset Management, Work Flow, Bed Management, and many other asset and people applications.
Certainty-based location data, unlike estimation-based information, can be used by hospitals to make important decisions, such as when to clean a patient room, and even for automated decisions, such as determining if a patient requires a physician visit if they have not been attended to in a given period of time. These and many other types of workflow improvements can only be realized when the location data is certainty-based.
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, CenTrak has attained an ease and cost effective level of installation previously unattainable. InTouchCare is currently operating in millions of square feet at several world-class healthcare sites in the United States. For more information about CenTrak, please visit www.centrak.com.