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Communicating instruments, Lukas Ruf, Fabian Glaser and Christoph Moser
© Stiftung Jugend forscht

Time and again, errors occur during medical operations: Instruments are not properly assigned, not sufficiently sterilized or even forgotten in the patient. Lukas Ruf (16), Fabian Glaser (18) and Christoph Moser (19) believe that this is avoidable. They want to electronically mark surgical instruments with robust and inexpensive RFID tags. The hospital staff wear readout wristbands that register who has used which cutlery for what and when. The data is sent to a central computer in real time via Bluetooth. Following discussions with experts and their own experiments, the young researchers designed the hardware for data readout. They also developed a program that can store the data for each instrument. The technology can be used to support maintenance and procurement.

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