Hospital asset tracking
A hospital's expensive instruments and equipment move from room to room, and someone has to know where each one is when it is needed.
How the original system could serve it
A tag on each piece of equipment would let the host show where it was at any moment. Readers and field generators would split the building into zones. The same system's access control could keep some areas, such as the rooms where drugs are kept, open only to the staff allowed in them.
The old site also proposed tracking patients and staff. This page describes the equipment only. The TigeRFID project makes no medical claim, and nothing here makes the system a medical device or a way to watch over patients.
Tags came in several shapes for equipment. The cardTag could sit on the flat surface of a piece of equipment. The tiewrapTag fastened around an item that could not take a tag on its surface. The jumboTag could flash or beep, so that someone could find it.
What a builder would need
A builder would need tags on the equipment, and readers and field generators for each area. Host software would show each item on a floorplan.
The rebuild's first milestone shows a tag carried between two zones, with the move appearing on a floorplan. That is the same idea at the scale of two rooms.
Building one today
Nobody has rebuilt the original hardware recently, so nobody knows whether the old files still make a working system. The TigeRFID project's study of the original found firmware for the sealTag only, and the rebuild's sealTag is a new design. A rebuild writes all of its firmware fresh.
The TigeRFID project is rebuilding the system from the ground up, for a complete beginner with free tools. To build your own, start at the TigeRFID repository, whose readme tells where the rebuild stands.
Nothing on this site says a rebuild may transmit on the original radios' frequencies as they are. Radio rules differ by country, and the TigeRFID project checks them before it chooses a rebuild's radios.
If you build one, or try, please report back in the repository's issues. What works and what fails both help the next builder.
Sources:
- the old site's Hospitals page and its featured-application box, as it served them until October 2026;
- the cardTag, tiewrapTag and jumboTag pages and the system overview on this site;
- the TigeRFID project's rules (its onboarding design, rule C8) and its plan on its main branch, for the rebuild's first milestone.