The RIFF system can keep a track of the employees washing their hands and also the cycle time of their hand washing process using an RIFF card or a bracelet. This system utilizes the simple concept of washing hands and aids In reducing the number of infections passed on by the staff Prevention, healthcare associated infections are one of the major causes for the death of hospitalized patients.
Humans or the healthcare workers are one of the major means of transmission of viruses and infections. Infections can spread either wrought direct contact or through the equipment used by these health care workers. Hand hygiene is therefore the fundamental measure in reducing the number of healthcare associated infections. The main aim of RIFF systems here is to improve the hand hygiene in hospitals by building an automated monitoring system (Bennett, Jarvis, & Brakeman, 2007).
The hand hygiene system comprises of the following measures to be taken to prevent the transmission of diseases: * Cleaning hands with soap * Hygienic hand rubs The main objective here is to kill the bacteria that live on the surface of the skin to void its transmission to other people when in contact. The hand rubs consist of alcohol that kills micro organisms from nails, hands and forearms. They prevent drying of skin and reduce the rapid re-growth of bacteria (Rafters, 2008). RIFF Hand Hygiene Monitoring System The RIFF technology uses small “tags” which emit radio signals.
These signals are read by the RIFF readers. One of the recent developed RIFF enabled system is a Intelligence’s wrist band system which functions as follows. * The RIFF readers are placed on the hand washing and sanitation stations and the RIFF system know all he locations of these stations. The employees who wear the wrist band developed by Intelligence consist of the tags that can be read by the readers that are present on these sanitation stations. The accelerometer that is present in the wrist band will identify the time spent by the wearer in washing the hand.
The wrist band will not buzz once if the hands are washed correctly and thrice if they are not. * The RIFF tags are also placed on some of the equipment and outside the patient’s rooms. Before carrying out any procedures that have higher risk of carrying infections, this yester alerts the health care workers to properly clean their hands. * The employees are monitored at the end of each shift by collecting the data from the wrist band through the micro USB. In this way the hand hygiene system is monitored by the use of RIFF (Young, 2013).
