Comments for The Bee's Knees: IBM's RFID to Track Prosthetics

The Bee's Knees: IBM's RFID to Track Prosthetics

2009-09-03T02:00:00Z

After having both knees replaced, my father has earned the nickname "the titanium bear". For months he sulked in front of the TV thinking only of his rising golf handicap. Implanet, a manufacturer of implantable medical devices hopes to keep my dad's knees intact by using IBM RFID solutions to alert him to recalls. According to a recent press release, the company will embed the tags into knee and hip replacements and use them to alert patients to any product-related concerns.

]]> Prior to shipping prosthetic parts, Implanet embeds an RFID tag with the device model, serial number and latest info enclosed. Prior to surgery, the hospital scans the tag and IBM's WebSphere Sensor Events software uploads the information to a server. Patients are then given the tag ID for alerts.

In the past ReadWriteWeb covered RFID and its rocky road to consumer adoption. Nevertheless, the enterprise market continues to find new uses for RFID. In fact, this is not the first time where RFID tags have appeared in hospitals. Companies like Wavemark have been working with health institutions to track cardiology machines and other inventory. In this particular case, because the indexing process does not require speed or long distance accuracy, Implanet makes use of IBM's RFID technologies.

Comment from kpknable on 2010-03-26

2010-03-26T13:34:58Z

This is a very interesting article, I guess I never though of passive RFID Readers" being used in this way. This will make it much easier to get information to the patients in a timely manner.

Comment from Vitamins on 2009-12-06

2009-12-07T05:55:26Z

So abductions are going to go from being very very frightening to being very very frightening minus one limb??I mean really, the arms race between security companies and criminals can only lead to devices that detect those kinds of implants. And then they just need something pointy to scoop it out!

Comment from Miramon on 2009-09-03

2009-09-03T14:35:18Z

Imbecilic, IMO.

RFIDs in the implants will do nothing useful unless the patient is actually comatose or is otherwise incompetent to get online, and if the doctor is too lazy to bother with the medical records or to track his patient's status.

Once a patient knows his implant model number or SKU or whatever, looking for recalls can be done trivially in the browser with no special hardware.

Just like that terrible consumer toy with the "mirror" concept whose name I forget, this notion requires the patient to own and bother to use a RFID scanner with a special purpose application. But this is a huge pain, more so than just firing up the browser by itself, especially considering you could use a mobile phone or other device anywhere in the world to look up the information manually, but the RFID thing will only work on the patient's home computer because that's where the scanner happens to be.

In any event, since these devices are rarely recalled, after the first N scans return nothing useful, no normal person will bother with it ever again. And now, yay, the patient has RFIDs in their joints, that's a brilliant idea.