Reproductive Clinic Uses RFID to Guarantee Parental Identity
(sz) At Overlake Reproductive Health, passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags and interrogators track human sperm, eggs and embryos throughout the assisted-reproduction process.
Overlake Reproductive Health, located in Bellevue, Wash., has become the first reproductive-medicine center in the United States to deploy an RFID-based system for tracking human eggs, sperm and embryos. This system should help ensure that no identity mistakes are made during collection, storage and fertilization.
A female client can visit the clinic to be artificially inseminated by a partner’s sperm, or to have her egg fertilized in vitro (in a test tube) and then implanted in her uterus. For either procedure, the couple may worry that the sperm or egg might be accidentally switched with someone else’s, resulting in a baby that is not biologically theirs. Although such mistakes rarely happen, the experience can be traumatic for parents when they do occur, subjecting a clinic to lawsuits and negative publicity. more…
From: »The RFiD Journal«