Near field communication based system for health monitoring

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short range, standard based wireless communication technology that allows two-way interaction between two NFC-enabled devices. This paper explains how the technology can be used to meet the challenges in the healthcare management. This technology is user-friendly and commercially viable and can be easily used by a nontechnical user also. NFC technology is available in the form of NFC cards, tags, key chains. Each NFC tag has a unique number which can be used for identification of patients in a hospital. The NFC tag can be used as an electronic health record to store the patient's medical history, prescriptions and real-time sensor data. The current health monitoring methods to measure the various health parameters are tedious and time consuming. The use of NFC along with wireless sensors intends to help the hospital staff to quickly access and monitor the patient's health record and health status respectively. The NFC technology provides ways to speed up the processes in hospitals: the doctors equipped with NFC-enabled tablets, computers can view all the information about a patient within seconds, without any issue of data being mixed. NFC provides accuracy and efficiency in healthcare as well as it is economically feasible.