Abstract
M.Ing. (Electrical And Electronic Engineering)
Patient safety in healthcare is sometimes compromised due to medical and clerical errors. These
errors can increase the operational cost of healthcare if not identified and rectified speedily. They
can also result in misdiagnosis, wrong treatment options being provided to patients and in the
worst case may result in fatalities. Healthcare errors in medication documentation,
administration, and prescription can cause incorrect medicine administration and dosage
instructions for patients. Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest percentage (adults is 59% and youth is 70%) of literacy compared to other regions of the world sitting at (adults is 84% and youth is
89%). The challenge facing illiterate patients is that they can easily make the same mistakes and
may not take their medication correctly. The application of Near Field Communication (NFC)
technology in healthcare has demonstrated some advantages of security, accuracy and
effectiveness over other technologies. The availability of NFC in some smartphones has also
encouraged the development of more applications.
The main objective of this thesis is to present a solution using an Android based NFC application
that enables a NFC enabled smartphone to read NFC tags placed on medication containers and
be able to play the audio instructions to illiterate patients. Based on a comprehensive review of
the literature on NFC applications in healthcare, this solution is the first of its kind. A set of
experiments were done in an effort to understand the operation of NFC phones under different
environments. The proposed application reads the NFC tag placed on the medicine container.
The data read from the NFC tag is used to identify the audio file corresponding to the particular
patient’s medicine instructions. If the audio instructions are not available, on the phone, it is
fetched from a remote server database using an Internet connection. The application
automatically plays the audio file to the patient.
Three research hypotheses were tested and it was confirmed that (H1), modified NFC antenna
can reduce the level of induced power in it; (H2), the NFC technology is faster and more
accurate in reading tag code that Barcode technology reading the barcode; (H3), the NFC reading
process of NFC tag code is not negatively affected by the amount of light in the environment it is
operated in. The Barcode reading accuracy was 10% errors when operating in the environment
with light brightness of 128000 lumens. When the light brightness was reduced to 8900 lumens, the Barcode accuracy errors increased to 45%.