Medigas Italia has fitted UHF RFID tags to the oxygen cylinders and trolleys it delivers to patients at home, and the company reports saving 20 minutes on every van it loads as a result. The deployment is documented in a case study published by Beontag on 30 January 2023, and in a project profile from Technology Solutions (UK) Ltd, the British maker of Bluetooth handheld UHF RFID readers that trades as TSL, whose readers the delivery drivers carry.
Medigas Italia is one of the primary suppliers of home-based oxygen therapy and mechanical ventilation services in Italy, looking after patients either in their own homes or in permanent residential structures through a range of therapeutic and diagnostic services. During the COVID-19 pandemic the company distributed thousands of new liquid oxygen containers across all of its medicinal workshops to meet rising national demand, and set up a crisis committee to guarantee home delivery to over nine hundred of its most vulnerable patients.
The problem is a distribution network with equipment in hundreds of homes across the country, where asset management and inventory movement have to be accurate without exception. Medigas Italia wanted to track and trace the gas cylinders and the other assets that move with them, including trolleys, along the whole distribution network, and to manage returns properly. Each respiratory therapy asset is uniquely identified as it is delivered to a patient, returned to the company’s own facility, and then maintained, inspected and serviced.
The hard part was the metal. A gas cylinder is a conductive, curved steel or aluminium surface, and a plain UHF RFID label stuck straight onto it will usually not read at all. The metal detunes the tag’s antenna, shifting it away from the frequency it was designed for and shorting out the radiating element, so the energy the reader puts into it is absorbed rather than reflected back. The way around it is a mount-on-metal label: a construction that holds the antenna off the surface with a dielectric spacer and uses the metal body itself as a ground plane, so the cylinder becomes part of the aerial instead of killing it. That is the class of tag specified here: Confidex Silverline on-metal labels, with Confidex Ironside Classic passive tags also among the products used. Confidex has supplied short-range wireless products to system integrators and end users for asset management, traceability, authentication and real-time location services since 2005, and is a Beontag company, part of that group’s RFID and IoT enablers arm.
Temperature peaks and durability were the other constraints, since the tags ride on cryogenic equipment and take repeated handling in the field. Mount-on-metal tags go on all models of LOX container, cylinder and cryogenic cylinder in the fleet. LOX is liquid oxygen, held at cryogenic temperature in a vacuum-insulated vessel so a usable volume of gas fits in something a patient can keep at home.
Each Medigas carrier, meaning each delivery driver, is equipped with an iPad Mini tablet, a portable printer and a TSL 1128 UHF RFID reader, with the devices talking to each other over Bluetooth. New on-metal labels are printed and encoded on a Zebra printer, Zebra being one of the long-established makers of industrial label printers with RFID encoding built into the print path, and verified by reading them back with the TSL reader, which feeds an integrated data management system.
The gain comes from mass reading. A barcode has to be presented one item at a time, in line of sight, which on a van load of cylinders means a driver physically handling every single one. A UHF reader interrogates the whole load in one sweep, with the tags in the field answering in turn under the air interface protocol’s anti-collision scheme, so a van is inventoried in seconds without anything being lifted. Verifying and saving the data takes just a few seconds, and the office can see exactly what went onto each vehicle from anywhere, not just from the loading bay.
The reported outcomes follow from that. Serial-number typing errors have been reduced to zero, because the numbers are captured automatically rather than keyed in. Traceability on the conveyance devices is fast and immediate. Documents can be displayed in real time, with the customer able to access the information immediately, and the company reports total compliance with patient therapy along with improved quality of service.
The project was run by IdeaPura, a Swiss consulting boutique specialising in RFID feasibility studies and project management, which designed the processes and took the system live. IdeaPura brought in Cisper Electronics B.V., a Netherlands-based RFID distributor, to supply the hardware side.
The RFID glossary covers on-metal tags and mass reading in more detail, and deployments like this one are collected in our healthcare, asset tracking and UHF sections.
Read more at https://tsl.com/project-profiles/medigas-italia
