Keeping every newborn safe, correctly matched to its mother and accounted for at all times is one of the most sensitive responsibilities a maternity facility carries. Identium’s RFID infant monitoring system has been deployed in support of a Government of Tamil Nadu programme to strengthen newborn safety in hospital wards.
The challenge
In a busy maternity ward, infants are moved many times a day — for feeding, tests, transfers and discharge. Relying on handwritten labels and manual handovers leaves room for mismatches and offers no automatic alert if a baby is taken towards an unauthorised exit. Hospitals needed positive identification at every touch point and a record they could audit.
What Identium deployed
Identium fitted the programme with its RFID infant monitoring solution, built around comfortable, skin-safe bands and automatic reads:
- Soft RFID infant bands electronically paired with the mother’s RFID wristband, so staff can verify the mother-baby match at every handover instead of relying on labels alone.
- Readers at ward exits and lifts that raise an immediate alert if a tagged infant approaches an unauthorised exit.
- Time-stamped logging of every read, giving the ward an automatic census of infants present and a complete movement trail.
The system fits within Identium’s broader healthcare and pharma offerings and shares hardware with our RFID healthcare patient tracking work. All equipment is built for India’s 865-868 MHz UHF band, and Identium is BIS certified and WPC approved.
The outcome
The deployment supports positive mother-baby matching at every touch point, faster and more reliable handovers, and immediate staff awareness if an infant approaches an exit it should not. Wards gain an automatic, auditable record of infant movement in place of manual labelling. The benefits described here are qualitative; we do not publish hard performance figures for this deployment.
Designing the supervised opening
Mother-baby pairing is the part of an infant security system that is easy to explain. The supervised opening is the hard part, and it is worth settling before a specification is written.
A reader at an opening detects presence, not intent. A cot parked near the ward door, a mother walking to the nursing station, a discarded band in a linen trolley — at the RF layer these look much like an infant being carried out. The design work in deployments of this kind is therefore converting presence into direction: two read zones per opening, inner and outer, so the software judges the order in which a band appears rather than the bare fact that it appeared, and, where the layout allows, an input from a door contact or beam-break so a read is only acted on once something has actually moved through. Circular polarisation is the usual default at a doorway, because a band on a carried newborn arrives at no predictable angle; it costs roughly 3 dB of range against a matched linear antenna, which is a fair trade where orientation is unpredictable.
Channel planning is the constraint people miss. Under the short-range-device rules notified on 10 December 2021 as G.S.R. 853(E), 2 W e.r.p. in the 865-868 MHz band is permitted only on the four 200 kHz channels centred at 865.7, 866.3, 866.9 and 867.5 MHz, with no more than four seconds of continuous transmission on a channel and at least 100 ms between bursts on the same channel — confirm the current position with WPC before anything goes into a tender. Four high-power channels is not many once a ward door, a lift lobby and a stairwell sit within sight of each other, so channels are worth allocating across the whole floor rather than door by door. Those burst limits, though, matter far less than the tag itself: a small band held against tissue is among the least cooperative loads in passive UHF, and a single-leaf doorway gives it a short window.
The failure mode that ends these systems is rarely a missed read at commissioning. It is nuisance alerts — once staff learn that an alarm usually means nothing, the system is finished whatever it measures. Keep the alert classes separate, so each carries its own threshold and its own expected response instead of one siren for everything: an exit alert, an unpaired read, and a tamper alert where the band construction supports reporting one.
Settle these before ordering
| Decision | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Openings to supervise, and the clear width at each | Antenna count, aiming and zone geometry |
| Direction logic: read sequence, door state, or both | Whether each opening needs two zones |
| Whether a deliberate close-range check happens at the cot | Either a separate HF 13.56 MHz credential, or a dual-frequency construction — sourced and converted to order, in fewer form factors, rather than held as stock |
| Whether a cut or removed band must raise its own alert | Band construction, and the alert class it maps to |
| Cleaning and reuse regime for mother bands | Band material: reusable silicone against single-use PVC or Tyvek |
| What a reader fault must do | Whether a dead zone surfaces as a fault rather than as calm |
Related reading
- Fixed UHF gate readers for doorways and portals
- RFID antenna guide: gain, polarisation and placement
- BIS and WPC compliance for RFID equipment in India
Looking to strengthen newborn safety in your facility? Request a quote and we will discuss a deployment tailored to your maternity ward.
Deployment details shared with client permission; specifics available on request.