If the blood gets too warm it can’t be reused if it is not needed during the surgery or procedure. The bags that hold blood supplies are getting smarter and will be able to monitor themselves and even help prevent the wrong blood type form being administered to a patient. Research being conducted at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany is using radio nodes attached to the bags blood are stored in to make monitoring easier.

These radio nodes will be able to continuously monitor the temperature of the blood to ensure it is not getting too warm to be used. The nodes can also interact with other nodes on the patient's bracelet, sound an alarm, and flash a red light if the wrong blood type is presented for patient use.

The intelligent radio nodes were developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and the Fraunhofer Working Group SCS in collaboration with T-Systems, Vierling, delta T and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The German ministry of economics and technology is funding the project.

“In contrast to tags that use RFID – radio frequency identification – we do not expect intelligent radio nodes to interfere with hospital medical devices,” explains Jürgen Hupp, head of communication networks department at IIS. “While the transmit power required for RFID tag reading can be as much as two watts, radio nodes only transmit in the milliwatt range.”

Another big improvement of these radio nodes compared to more traditional RFID chips is that the RFID tag can only be read when activated by the RFID reader whereas radio nodes broadcast continually. The continual transmitting of the radio nodes also makes them a good option for tracking important equipment within a hospital. Equipment routinely gets moved between departments at the hospital and finding the equipment can be a challenge. Equipment with the radio nodes attached could send constant location updates to a central location.