A distributed approach to Complex Event Processing in RFID-enabled hospitals

In this article we adopt the Complex Event Processing (CEP) approach for the management of information related to patients status in the context of RFID-enabled hospitals. Our main objective is to support clinical risk management by combining data from different RFID-based appliances used to monitor patient identification, patient tracking and drugs administration control. We propose a distributed system that directly embodies essential CEP principles such as event abstraction, event aggregation and event transformation to offer a hierarchical and distributed architecture where CEP capabilities are supplied by processing nodes. Events flowing through the system levels are progressively aggregated and refined in order to produce a global scoped information. In addition, we introduce specific events patterns aimed at identifying possible dangerous patient conditions.