A multidisciplinary approach to investigate potential exposure risks on drugs of RFID systems

In the near future, the wireless technologies will play a very important role in healthcare applications, especially for tracing and tracking systems of objects and people. Among these, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solutions promise to substantially improve both many processes in healthcare environments and the patient safety connected to the reduction of errors in drug prescriptions and administration. Unfortunately, there are still some barriers limiting the large-scale deployment of these innovative technologies in the healthcare sector. In order to face these challenges, multidisciplinary skills are required. A recent research project has attempted to coordinate heterogeneous activities focused on the tracing and tracking of drugs at item level on the pharmaceutical supply chain. One of these is related to the evaluation of potential effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields, generated by RFID devices in UHF band, on drugs. This paper aims to introduce some investigative techniques useful to carry out an experimental protocol able to evaluate the potential alterations of the molecular structure of some biological drugs exposed to electromagnetic fields. The work highlighted that the experimental analysis is complex because it depends strongly on particular molecules. Some experimental results on ActrapidTM, a human insulin preparation, are reported. They showed the absence of substantial alterations both in molecular structure and biological activity of ActrapidTM.