Cordless data acquisition in a hospital environment

A hospital has many demands on its resources. Work in the Computer Science Department at University of Wales, carried out in conjunction with Morriston Hospital, has resulted in two separate schemes aimed at two areas of expenditure. The first scheme involves the use of portable computers to help domestic staff in determining patient preferences for their normal meals. The second scheme provides central monitoring and control of the issuing, transportation, and administration of drugs. Both these schemes use barcodes as the means of communicating the name of the patient and other relevant information back to the central computer. The author describes the operation and application of a soft barcode generator which can be used to send text and numeric data to standard barcode reading equipment, so that data collection can be carried out using the same hand-held scanners that are presently used for drug administration.<>