A popular video making the rounds on the Web for an Xperia smartphone accessory shows a somewhat hipsterish young man going through his day while merrily rubbing his phone against a bunch of tags. When he enters his car for a drive, he taps the tag draped over the rearview mirror in his car, and it "sets" his phone to go into GPS-and-driving mode. When he gets home for the evening, he taps a tag on his nightstand, and his phone then goes into sleepy time mode, with the ringer off and the alarm automatically set for the next day.

Soon, thanks to the work of two companies, something similar could be coming to a radiology department near you.

NFC's big year

The technology behind the tapping is called near field communications, or NFC. It's a standard that was finalized in 2004 by Nokia, Philips and Sony (which makes Xperia), when they founded the NFC Forum.

The tech is similar to that used by so-called proximity RFID tags, and uses radio waves to get two electronics devices communicating. In general, it involves a "passive" NFC chip, or tag, and a reader. NFC is only effective over a few centimeters at most -- a selling point, according to its backers, who claim this makes it more secure. But it also means that to get the devices talking, you have to tap them together.


Sony's video explaining how "SmartTags" -- i.e., NFC tags -- work

The NFC Forum which, with fellow-minded vendors in the Smartcard Alliance, is hosting a gathering about the technology in May in San Francisco, thinks 2012 is going to be a big year for NFC. Much of the excitement about NFC centers on electronic payments, where companies turn smartphones into electronic wallets. This is already happening. Just a short while ago, Google launched such an app, Google Wallet, that works with its Nexus S 4G phone, and lets people buy stuff by tapping their phone at compatible cash registers. In fact, the NFC Forum estimates nearly 150,000 vendors have NFC-friendly point-of-sale terminals. And this year the market for NFC mobile payments is expected to exceed $30 billion, according to Jupiter Research information cited by the group.

NFC meets DR

But tapping your phone to buy a tube of toothpaste at Duane Reade instead of pulling out your billfold is not the only application of the technology. Some companies are looking at uses in health care. And two businesses, Identive Group Inc., and WPG Americas Inc, are working on a pilot project in radiology departments across the country.

In this, instead of tapping to instantly configure settings on your phone, you use NFC as a no-fuss way to configure a portable digital X-ray unit as you move it through a hospital and get it to link up with different patients' electronic medical records or set it to transfer images to a nearby laptop or workstation.

"The basic application is to use an NFC tag attached to the [X-ray] camera or other portable medical device that needs to transmit data to a patient record," Louis Modell, vice president of ID infrastructure with Identive, told DOTmed News. "An Identive USB Contactless NFC reader is attached to a laptop or desktop computer. Tapping the reader to the tag causes the pairing of the WiFi, or Bluetooth between the devices.”

Identive's system

Identive, based in Santa Ana, Calif., was formed from the 2010 marriage of SCM Microsystems, a contactless and contact-based smart card reader technology and solutions company, and Bluehill ID, an RFID group focused on contactless and identity management technologies. Identive is an OEM supplier of NFC tags and readers to WPG, which will be offering the service to customers once the pilot project wraps up.

As Modell explains it, the system would work as follows: an NFC tag is attached to a portable digital radiography unit. The DR equipment is then brought into an examination room, and a workstation, laptop or other device with a reader is "tapped" against the X-ray unit. This instantly configures the room's WiFi to link the IP address of the X-ray unit to the laptop or device. It can also pair imaging studies being done to a patient's medical record.

The NFC technology is not actually used to transmit images, Modell says, as it's too slow. Instead, it's merely a protocol that changes the settings and reconfigures connections to let the X-ray unit transmit the images over the local wireless network. But it does away with the hassle of requiring radiographers to manually alter settings every time they want to tie an image to a patient's record or send it to a specific device.

"Reconfiguring Bluetooth...reconfiguring Wi-Fis and having it transfer to that particular [system] - that would be a nightmare," Modell says. "Everybody can tap, that's the great thing about NFC."

Pilot project running now

The price of the actual NFC readers is quite low -- Identive's SCL3711 NFC readers retail for about $39 -- but the cost of the system, likely turnkey and set up by WPG, isn't known yet. The pilot project, which only started late last year, already has "thousands" of units rolled out, Modell said, but he doesn't know when it will be commercially available.

Nonetheless, he said he can see this taking off with different types of providers.

"You can really take this in any doctor’s office or dental office or orthopedic facility, where they’re taking lots of X-rays," he said.