Bucky’s Big Ten Challenge is an annual event on the UW-Madison campus. The event was created to encourage blood donation in the winter, a time when the hospital blood supply is generally low. This past February, UW-Madison competed against seven other Big Ten universities to collect more than 1,200 units of blood— enough to potentially save 3,600 lives.
Device used to test the effect of radio frequencies on blood samples.
Photo Credit: Wai Keat TanFor donors, the process ends at the snack table, but the blood processing is far from over. The blood is tracked from the donation site to hospitals all over the world in order to ensure safety for transfusion recipients. Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology being researched at UW-Madison to increase efficiency and alleviate some of the concerns with blood donation tracking.
The blood tracking system is somewhat similar to e-mail. If an e-mail address is off by even one symbol, the message will not reach the prescribed recipient. For simple messages between friends, this may not be a big deal; however, if an error in the address means not receiving a tuition statement or an important memo from a boss, the results could be much more problematic. Likewise, in blood donation, every aspect of the blood data must travel with the bag as it travels from donation, through processing and on to the hospital. And similar to an incorrect e-mail address, if one number or letter in the blood data is incorrect, the results create serious problems.
If the blood is not properly tracked, the complications with blood transfusions may not be fully realized until it is too late. In 2005, there were over 32,000 patients with adverse reactions to blood transfusion. The most common problems included fever or allergic reactions. Hemolytic reactions, which occur when the recipient’s blood doesn’t match the transfusion blood type and the recipient’s immune system tries to fight off the new red blood cells, are very rare but fatal. The hope is that the new RFID technology will drastically reduce the number of adverse reactions.
The concept of the RFID technology is similar to radar, first utilized during World War II to discern enemy aircraft. It wasn’t until a 1999 study of ultra high frequency waves (900 megahertz or greater) initiated at MIT that UW-Madison researchers in the EBusiness Consortium began extensive work with the RFID technology.
The E-Business Consortium is a collaboration of more than 65 companies working with UW-Madison to break down barriers between business and academia while encouraging interdisciplinary research. (See Wisconsin Engineer April 2008 issue)
“We [at the E-Business Consortium] believe collaboration is a strategy to speed up adoption of new technologies,” Alfonso Gutierrez, head of RFID research at UW-Madison, says.
The current project using RFID technology on blood bags was started at UW-Madison in 2006. A microchip is attached to the blood donation bag, much like a system of bar-coded stickers, and is capable of carrying with it all essential health information. However, compared to the RFID technology, barcodes are inefficient and are much more likely to make mistakes.
With RFID technology a 30 bag container of blood can be scanned in less than 30 seconds.
Photo Credit: Wai Keat Tan“In one container there may be 30 bags of blood, each containing four barcode stickers that have to be scanned individually. It would take eight minutes to do one container, but with RFID we scan the whole container in less than 30 seconds,” Gutierrez says.
The RFID team at UW-Madison is currently in the prototype stage of design and hopes to start the pilot program for this technology some time next year. Because RFID uses a low level of radiation in the scanning process, it must be approved by the FDA to ensure that the radiation will not negatively affect the blood.
RFID technology has the potential to increase safety of transfusions by reducing scanning mistakes and thus saving blood, as well as saving labor time in the scanning process; still, some are skeptical. Adding a personal ID to donor data is likely to create some concerns about privacy. With the proper policies in place to protect privacy, however, those concerns should be minimized.
The project is receiving funding from the Blood Centers of Wisconsin, Carter Blood Care and Mississippi Blood Services, and there are currently three participating hospitals as well as three blood centers cooperating to help finalize the processes for implementing the RFID technology.
“We’re trying to design a whole solution that has enough flexibility to fit each of them as well as the possibility of other blood centers. We’re hoping to build a solution that might eventually become a standard for the industry,” Pashmeen Ghia, a graduate student in industrial engineering and an RFID team member, says.
The RFID team hopes to have a pilot product out by next year, and assuming all goes as planned, a full-scale distribution within the next two or three years. Once the RFID technology is approved, the possibilities for other applications are nearly endless. Other ideas in the medical field alone include using RFID to track IV pumps, respirators, wheelchairs, and even matching patients with the correct doctors. UW-Madison researchers hope that the RFID technology will replace the use of barcodes entirely, ushering in a new era of increased safety and efficiency for blood transfusions.