Stanley Healthcare has announced that its Hugs Wi-Fi Infant Protection solution with its Kisses Mother/Infant Matching feature, has been deployed at Lakes Region General Hospital (LRGH), in New Hampshire.

The Hugs Infant Protection System is a tracking solution enabling hospitals to locate tags on babies, as well as identify when those tags may be leaving an authorized area, or come into contact with the wrong mother. It leverages a hospital's existing Wi-Fi network.

The Hugs solution protects newborn infants against the risk of abduction not only in LRGH's Family Birthplace section, but anywhere throughout the hospital covered by Wi-Fi, according to Stanley Healthcare. The facility's Family Birthplace provides care to mothers, babies and families, and contains eight suites that are arranged to allow for a mother to labor, deliver and recover in one room without separating the child from the family. It expects to deliver 325 babies this year.

Each infant wears a tiny Hugs battery-powered Wi-Fi RFID tag on his or her ankle that is attached via a special tamper-detecting band, offering multiple layers of security, including exit protection, tamper detection (to alert personnel to the tag's unauthorized removal) and continual supervision, as well as alerts in the event that the child is detected in an unauthorized area of the hospital. Employees can access the information from in-room PCs or any browser-enabled Microsoft Windows device, enabling personnel to complete procedures more efficiently and with less disruption to patients. System activity can also be monitored on any Windows device with network access, with alerts pushed to workers via Apple iPhone or iPod mobile digital devices, IP phones, Vocera badges, text messaging and e-mail.

In addition, Stanley Healthcare says, LRGH is using the Kisses component of the Hugs solution to provide automatic and audible matching of infants and mothers. Each mother is given a Kisses Wi-Fi RFID tag, which is bonded with her infant's Hugs tag; whenever the two are brought together anywhere within the hospital, the tag checks for a proper match.