Medication error protection system with a body area communication tag

Errors in administering medication are serious problems. Most errors are due to some confusion between the patient and the medication. The bar-code has been used to deal with this problem. However, since a nurse has to put a reader over a bar-code tag, there is still room for improvement when, say, a nurse is affected by stress due to too heavy a workload. As a safer alternative to bar-codes and RFIDs, we propose Touch-tag, a body area communication tag. The concept is that the patient wears a tag and the nurse has a Touch-tag reader that reads the ID on the tag by a nurse just by touching the patient. Since a nurse usually touches a patient during administration of medication, the medical error protection system using the Touch tag does not involve any additional work. We describe the medical error protection system with the Touch-tag and experiments to confirm whether the Touch tag works well or not.