From source to destruction: RFID technology helps trace the entire process of medical waste

Medical waste refers to the waste generated by medical and health institutions in medical, preventive, healthcare, and other related activities that has direct or indirect infectivity, toxicity, and other hazards. Medical waste contains a large amount of pathogenic microorganisms and chemical agents, which have dangerous characteristics such as spatial transmission, acute transmission, and latent transmission. The harm of its viral pathogens is tens or even thousands of times that of ordinary urban household waste.

At present, the management system of medical waste is very imperfect, and the environmental pollution caused by medical waste has not been controlled from the source. The annual production of medical waste reaches millions of tons, but the centralized disposal rate is only 10%. In addition, there is no full supervision of the collection, storage, transportation, treatment and disposal of medical waste in the management process. A large amount of data information is collected manually and recorded in paper form, which is not easy to save, easily damaged and lost, difficult to query, and the quality and efficiency of work rely entirely on human experience and responsibility. The quality of management cannot be guaranteed, resulting in the frequent occurrence of medical waste mixed with household waste or household waste mixed with medical waste, causing secondary pollution and seriously threatening people's health. Once the virus flows into society with waste, it will pose a huge threat to social stability and human health. The traditional regulatory model is no longer able to meet regulatory requirements, and medical waste accidents caused by human unintentional or intentional negligence occur from time to time. The continuous occurrence of such incidents across the country is constantly sounding the alarm for us. Exploring a new medical waste supervision system to achieve safer and more efficient supervision of medical waste is of great significance.

Project Content

RFID wireless radio frequency identification technology is an emerging high-tech technology that has revolutionized the field of automatic identification after barcode recognition. With the characteristics of long-distance transmission and high-speed data exchange, it uses specific protocols to achieve automatic identification of identified item information. In the recognition of target objects, RFID technology has essential advantages compared to the widely used barcode technology: wireless long-distance reading and writing, penetrability reading and writing, reading and writing at high speeds, storing more data, and being able to be used in harsh environments, etc. Therefore, RFID technology has completely overturned traditional management models in numerous fields of automatic identification.·

Through research on the management process of medical waste, with RFID technology as the core, a new medical waste management system based on RFID technology is constructed to supervise the entire process of collection, transportation, and destruction of medical waste, eliminate possible loopholes, and effectively prevent the spread of various viruses and other pathogenic bacteria sources during the collection, transportation, and destruction of medical waste. This achieves intelligent management of the entire process of medical waste from collection and transportation to sorting, utilization, treatment, and disposal tracking. At the same time, it reduces the intensity of waste flow management statistics work, improves the scientific and preparatory nature of statistical data, further standardizes and informatizes medical waste management work, and improves the level of medical waste supervision.

system flow

The RFID medical waste management system consists of an intelligent integrated RFID reader, weight collection device, display system, sound and light prompt system, server, information transmission system, etc. The specific operation process is as follows:

When the collection personnel arrive at the medical waste collection point, the person in charge of medical waste at the hospital first presents a legally authorized electronic tag, opens the electronic flow of collection and handover, records the time, location, and personnel information, and uploads them to the control center server to achieve electronic recording.

The person in charge of the receiving party shall issue a legally authorized electronic tag, record the time, location, and personnel information, and upload it to the server. After the server comparison is successful and recorded, the system automatically starts the collection and transportation of electronic flow, completing the electronic handover of medical waste. The entire process is completed within 1 second.

Weigh each bucket of medical waste and write the responsible person information, time, location, and weight information of both parties involved in the handover into an electronic tag using RFID technology, and upload it to the server for record keeping.

After the transportation and allocation of medical waste, it arrives at the incineration center. The RFID system reads the tag information and automatically compares the information. The comparison result is uploaded to the monitoring room of the incineration center, and an alarm is triggered if the comparison fails