Acquisition of Physical Data in an Automated System for Monitoring Medication Stocks

Medical units from public system constantly need new ideas to improve the processes that support medical activity, making each procedure more efficient through some control and automation measures. Besides medical interventions that are performed into a hospital, one of the main activities made by the medical staff is the management of medication for patients. This paper describes a monitoring system which has two functions: one based on weight sensors, that allows detection of taking or placing medication vials, and another one, based on radio-frequency identification (RFID), that reacts when objects with special tags (which contain electronically stored information) are placed nearby RFID reader. The aim of this paper is to present the data acquisition phase of this environment interaction system.