SINGAPORE General Hospital (SGH) is transforming the way doctors and nurses monitor patients' temperatures and movements - reducing paperwork and the need for labour-intensive records.

In a $100,000 trial that began last Monday, patients in an orthopaedic ward are each tagged with a 30mm diameter ThermoSensor disc to allow doctors and nurses to monitor their temperatures and locations any time and anywhere on a personal digital assistant, a tablet PC or any of the hospital's computers.

The technology frees nurses from the tedious and repetitive task of taking the patient's temperature manually, charting it on paper before keying the information into the computers.

The hospital has also introduced a tracing system that can be used during major outbreaks of disease, like the Sars epidemic in 2003.

It has issued all doctors and nurses at the same orthopaedic ward with radio-frequency identification (RFID) or smart tags that can record and trace all the people with whom they come into contact at the hospital.

SGH consultant orthopaedic surgeon Yang Kuang Ying, 38, said: 'We learnt from the Sars incident that it was difficult to do contact tracing based mainly from memory.'

Cadi Scientific is a Singapore company that develops wireless sensing devices.

A similar RFID system was introduced at Alexandra Hospital's accident and emergency department at the height of Sars, mainly for contact tracing. The hospital issued all patients and accompanying visitors with RFID tags when they arrived for screening and registration.

However, the hospital's spokesman said the RFID system was not implemented at Alexandra Hospital.

According to Dr Yang, the idea behind the SGH integrated wireless system is simple: to give doctors and nurses instant but secure access to patient data like temperature, location and the doctors and nurses who had attended to them in the past few hours or days.

One patient who found that the ThermoSensor had made her stay at SGH bearable was Madam Margaret Wong, 60, a cleaning supervisor at Changi Airport. She had knee replacement surgery last week and was fitted with a disc after developing post-operative fever.

'Having the disc pasted on my tummy was very convenient,' she said.

'The nurses didn't have to keep waking me up at intervals to take my temperature and I was able to sleep without any interruption.'

If the trial is a success, SGH and Cadi Scientific will develop second-generation smart tags that will not only monitor a patient's temperature, but also his blood pressure, heartbeat and breathing.