NFC ensures that bags used for medical waste collection are genuine
Medical waste collection is an essential part of patient care in hospitals and nursing institutions. Improper operation may lead to odor leakage, which may bring potential risk of infection and environmental hazards. Therefore, the Dutch company less2care uses NFC technology to ensure the correct use of vacuum sealing waste related products. The company’s vacuscan system is designed to provide vacuum sealing and safe handling of materials in a medical environment.
This vacuum system combines NFC and RFID technology to automatically detect whether genuine bags of less2care brand are used, so as to better ensure the sustainable odor free treatment of medical waste. Aucxis, an RFID solutions company, provides RFID readers built into vacuum equipment, RFID tags attached to garbage bags and firmware for managing data collection. Less2care’s solution has been used in several sanatoriums in the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia, and the NFC & RFID version is expected to be available this summer.
Less2care was founded in 2010 by the company’s CEO, jop van haaren, and mainly sells vacuum packaging equipment. After studying the management of medical waste in medical facilities, he found that vacuum sealing can eliminate the odor of waste and avoid leakage or pollution due to improper treatment. Therefore, the company has developed and optimized a solution for effective collection and vacuum treatment of medical waste, and established a complete tracking process from the patient bed to the back of the garbage truck.
Van Harlan said that if the wrong bag and system were used, problems could occur. Some of these bags are made from recycled materials, and less2care is the only supplier of vacuum bags with a “gas barrier” made from a single raw material. He pointed out that all other products on the market are made up of a variety of plastics, which makes the recycling process more difficult. The thickness of the company’s own products is 110 μ m. Designed for vacuum treatment under limited impact.
The collection of waste by medical departments must also be carried out in airtight bags. Van Harlan said the bags could replace the waste water separator or grinder process used to treat certain medical waste jobs, and residues and cleaning agents are now rarely discharged into sewers. To ensure that the system does not operate on the wrong waste collection bags, less2care began working with aucxis and used the NFC 13.56 MHz label that meets the ISO 14443 standard.
NFC labels can be attached to the bag or embedded in the material of the bag, but less2care has chosen the labeling method. After the employees collect the waste into the bag, they need to pass the NFC system to authenticate the bag, and then vacuum it. Once the bag is properly placed in the vacusan device, the reader built into the device will capture the unique ID number encoded on the tag to confirm whether the bag is genuine. After the ID number is captured, it will prompt the vacuum cleaning process to start; If the tag is not queried, vacusan will not work.
According to Patrick cathhoor, senior account manager and business consultant of aucxis, aucxis will provide less2care with about 100 to 1000 NFC readers a year after the NFC version of the solution is launched this summer. The company first provided a proof of concept for less2care last year and then started developing NFC readers that can be integrated into vacusan in January.
According to Patrick cathhoor, senior account manager and business consultant of aucxis, aucxis will provide less2care with about 100 to 1000 NFC readers a year after the NFC version of the solution is launched this summer. The company first provided a proof of concept for less2care last year and then started developing NFC readers that can be integrated into vacusan in January.
According to carthur, it is a challenge for aucxis to develop an NFC reader with the best performance and integrate it into the vacusan device, while reading the tags in the right place at close range.
Aucxis’s internal R & D department has developed hardware according to these requirements. They carry their own firmware on the NFC reader to make it best coordinate with the final application, and can effectively communicate with the internal logic system of vacusan. The final result is to build a single board NFC reader on the microcontroller with integrated antenna. The reader uses the power supply of the vacusan device and communicates with the PLC that controls the operation of the vacusan. The close reading range enables the system to prompt the dust cleaning operation only when the bag is locked in place.
So far, NFC components have only been used to certify each bag before vacuuming. However, in the future, these labels can be used to further identify the waste in the treatment process. “Today, we have 700 vacusan devices in the Netherlands and about 1000 in Europe,” van harlen said. Moreover, the deployment of this kind of products in the whole European continent has been growing. Last year alone, the company’s business grew by 80%. “