Active RFID Contact Tracing System Background Contact tracing has always been important as a process employed by health authorities in the control of communicable diseases. The main purposes of contact tracing are to confirm the diagnosis, determine the extent of secondary transmission and identify control measures. The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) reported worldwide in 2003 is one example of an urgent need to trace the contact history of an infected person for a prolonged period. Most of the contact tracing methods practiced are manual and very time consuming. There were couples of electronic automated schemes introduced during the SARS period. They were not very popular due to some of the limitations such as increased cost, complexity, difficulty in installation, reduced battery life etc. These limitations prevented them from being widely deployed in spite of the fact that contact tracing is a very critical requirement towards containment of diseases such as SARS. Active RFID Contact Tracing System Active RFID Contact Tracing System was designed and developed with these limitations in mind so as to provide viable alternative to the current systems. So, the team came up with novel techniques to design mobile tags that could operate on coin- sized battery consuming very low power. It is very efficient in its operation and easy to install. It consists of three functional modules – a reader, beacons and mobile active RFID tags. Tags are worn by personnel and can exchange information among them. A tag is carefully designed with low power circuitry and protocols to provide long battery life and small size. Beacons provide location information to the tags. The reader is used to activate (issue) and deactivate (return) tags, and to download information from the tags. All the processes such as tag activation/deactivation, tracking and information downloading are done wirelessly. These features make the system very easy to install and use. Reducing power consumption in the tags is a very challenging task when the tags have to receive information in addition to transmitting it. Our tags can operate efficiently with off-the-shelf button cells for many months. As long as the persons to be traced are wearing a tag each, their contact information such as identity and time of contact will be exchanged and recorded in their respective tag. This can happen anywhere and anytime as far as they are in proximity, with no other infrastructure required. Active RFID Contract Tracing System is a system that can be applied to other areas also where short range proximity-based contact tracing is needed. It can be applied to a supermarket environment to study consumer browsing pattern in supermarket. It can also be applied to study the interaction behavior of wild animals in nature. Benefit In the context of SARS, contact tracing for medical surveillance proved fundamental as a control measure in facilitating early diagnosis and treatment of disease among contacts and preventing disease spread in the community. Most of the contact tracing is done manually and is very time consuming. For example, in the case of a hospital,

contact tracing involves asking the patient, visitor or healthcare worker later diagnosed with SARS to recall where in a hospital he had been to and when. This has to be compared with other similar records in order to come out with conclusions. This is tedious, time consuming and not very reliable in many cases. There are limited automated techniques using electronic tags for contact tracing. But these systems either require prior installation and wiring or the battery for the tag lasts only a few hours. The current innovation makes the installation process easy and fast. By issuing an electronic communicating tag to all the visitors coming to the hospital the contacts they have made and the information about locations they had been are automatically captured. This information can be retrieved very fast just by the issue of a command to the system. The system can be installed in an ad hoc manner even under emergency conditions, as no wiring is required. All the critical units of the system including the tags and beacons operate wirelessly. The battery for the tag can last for a few months. In general, the system can be applied to any scenario requiring contact tracing, more so for the communicable diseases. It can play a significant role in preventing the diseases from further spreading and causing loss of lives, revenues and jobs.

Figure 1: An illustration of how the system works

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Figure 2 : Prototype of the Mobile Tags

Field Trial A field trail in a local hospital Aconducted to test the performanthan I2R as the technology provSolution Provider and Software Challenges faced and Solution The Active RFID Contact Tracito perform the task. Challenges propagation in different indoor RF signal is easily affected by lbody. This posed a challenge topersons were positioned back tothe signal from the two tags frominformation between tags. Additional functionality was imCoverage of beacons was enhanthe system. The backend databaextrapolation to obtain missing information gathered from tags, Full coverage by the beacons ovreliability of the scheme. Ensuri The large open spaces in the waThe beacons must not be deployobstruct the traffic flow and it mbeacons had to be re-designed todesigned a ceiling mount antennenhance coverage without causi

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StarTrack Contact Tracing System

ccidents and Emergency (A&E) Department was ce of the Active RFID Contact Tracing System. Other ider, ETPL has pulled in System Integrator, Hardware Solution provider as partners in this trial.

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ng System employs Radio Frequency (RF) technology in such systems include unpredictability of RF environment.

arge liquid and metal objects, including the human ensure the contact information is captured when two back. In such condition, the human bodies blocked reaching each other. This prevented the exchange of

plemented in the backend system to address this issue. ced and number of beacons were increased to improve se system could analyse the data collected and do contact information. This can be done based on beacons and time stamp.

er the entire area was implemented to ensure the ng the full coverage posed new challenges.

iting areas posed an issue when deploying the beacons. ed in the middle of the open space, because it would ay affect the physical look of the environment. The be mounted at the ceiling. I2R’s antenna team a to address this. The new beacon antenna helped ng obstruction as well as retaining the aesthetics.

The original system, together with the enhancements, had achieved high level of accuracy and reliability. However, for a mission critical task, the hospital’s A&E department expects zero error. To achieve this zero error, the system requires further enhancements as well as some re-design. Conclusion The Active RFID Contract Tracing System greatly reduces the manual work required for the tracing of contact history of patients, staff and visitors in a hospital. A field trial was conducted in a realistic environment. Through this trial, valuable experiences were gained in terms of real-time practical issues and challenges, as well as having a better understanding of the users’ requirement.