RFID too expensive for healthcare

The author of a report on improving patient safety in hospitals says identifying patients and their medications with a bar code is a more acceptable solution than radio frequency identification (RFID), reports ComputerWorld.

Some experts, such as IBM partner Bill Doak, have advocated RFID as a state-of-the-art tool for patient identification. However, report author Bruce Anderson says given the current state of technology, RFID markers are too expensive.

The scheme envisaged would involve marking each single dose of medication with the patient's identifier and other data. There would be so many markers that RFID costs would quickly mount, he says.

A computer glitch will delay the new Australian public transport smart card for months, forcing government intervention in the A$500 million project, reports Herald Sun.

The Transport Ticketing Authority confirmed yesterday the software was not fully developed and a problem had delayed testing. The news has angered a government increasingly concerned about the cost of the TTA and problems with the smart card, called myki.

Jessica Harris, speaking for Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky, said software and public transport specialists would be appointed to the board of the TTA, an independent statutory authority.

In a recent Black Hat demonstration, RFID passport readers were reportedly "crashed" when a manipulated JPEG 2000 photo was included in an RFID-enabled passport, reports AIM Global.

The corrupted image caused a "buffer overflow" fault in the readers by containing more data than was expected and halting the reading process.

This has been hyped as a problem with RFID, but the truth is that it was a reader programming oversight. The software should have rejected the data (and e-Passport) instead of allowing the buffer overflow to stop the reading program.