NFC for Public

Abstract

One of the largest IT challenges in the health and medical fields is the ability to track large numbers of patients and materials. As mobile phone availability becomes ubiquitous around the world, the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) with mobile phones is emerging as a promising solution to this challenge. The decreasing price and increasing availability of mobile phones and NFC allows us to apply these to developing countries in order to overcome patient identification and disease surveillance limitations, and permit improvements in data quality, patient referral and emergency response. In this paper, we present a generalizable system using NFC-enabled mobile phones which has been designed to address the needs of a project that tracks and cares for patients.