RFID in Healthcare, Medicine, and Pharmaceuticals

Rajit Gadh, PhD
Professor and Director UCLA-WINMEC

June 29, 2005
CLU - Richter Hall Ahmanson Science Building

The FDA has just approved RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology for medical use in humans. RFID an innovative solution that opens the door for an immense set of opportunities, such as recording patient ID, patient's condition and safety, record of past treatments, important medical conditions that need to be known by healthcare staff, but also integrated medication management. The hospital setting also is a fertile ground for RFID with asset management, and inventory control.

This talk will introduce the concept and scope of RFID, present its potential for the healthcare/medical industry, share the wisdom and lessons learned from its use in other industry, and will leave the audience with an interesting perspective on the impacts of RFID in the humanity's ability to manage its health. RFID is now also being introduced in the pharmaceutical industry - current and potential applications of which will be discussed.

Rajit Gadh, PhD

Dr. Rajit Gadh is a Professor at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA (http://winmec.ucla.edu/director) where he is Founder and Director of the UCLA Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium (http://winmec.ucla.edu) of which major companies including Intel, HP, Siemens, Northrop Grumman, Hughes Network Systems, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Sprint, Lucent and others are supporting members. Dr. Gadh works in the areas of RFID-middleware, RFID-sensor interface definitions, and, wireless internet technologies for enterprise applications http://winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/. He has over 125 papers in journals, conferences and technical magazines and owns 3 patents. In this lab at UCLA, Dr. Gadh and his research team have developed the WinRFID middleware technology (http://winmec.ucla.edu/winrfid), which manages RFID networks and allows rapid creation of RFID enabled applications including those in healthcare, medicine and pharmaceutical industries. The system is now available for use in these industries.

Dr. Rajit Gadh has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters from Cornell University and a Bachelors from IIT Kanpur. He has taught as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, has been Full Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his sabbatical as a visiting researcher at Stanford University. Dr. Gadh worked for two software companies and is co-founder of two technology startups. He won several awards from NSF (CAREER award, Research Initiation Award, NSF-Lucent Industry Ecology Award, GOAL-I award), SAE (Ralph Teetor award), ASME (Kodak Best Technical Paper award), AT&T (Industrial ecology fellow award), Engineering Education Foundation (Research Initiation Award), etc., and other accolades in his career. He is an advisor to several venture funds and startup companies in Southern California and Silicon Valley. His talk on "RFID: The Wireless Internet of Artifacts" has been a keynote presentation at several conferences and forums in the last one year.