Barbara Christe, program director, biomedical engineering technology, associate professor, engineering technology department, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Indianapolis, and her colleagues and students have received the 2008 Outstanding Management & Technology Paper award from AAMI for their research on adapting radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to a clinical application.

Christe, Professor Elaine Cooney, Gregg Maggioli of BlueBean, and students Dustin Doty, Robert Frye, and Jason Short received the recognition for their paper, “Testing Potential Interference with RFID Usage in the Patient Care Environment,” which was printed in AAMI’s peer-reviewed journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology.

The group performed the research in response to a June 2008 study printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that concluded that RFID could induce potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices. The IUPUI study found that the JAMA study used unrealistic scenarios to generate incidents of interference and that RFID technology is safe when antennas are placed in appropriate locations for these use scenarios.

“It is good to be recognized for something so important,” Christe said. “There is very little academic research in the engineering arena on the application of technology in health care, in part because the human body is outside the comfort zone of most engineers. More scientific research is needed focusing on clinical applications.”

The group conducted the study with support from the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Institute at IUPUI and BlueBean LLC.