Daily Archives: April 29, 2010
Barcode Your Baby with Sticky Labels
Kettering hospital have come up with a great new way to improve the safety of newborn babies – barcoding them with sticky labels.
On the face of things, this could be seen as a negative – how many comic and video game villains have a barcode on them, after all – but in the main, it’s most definitely a positive. These barcodes will track lots of necessary bits of information such as the baby’s name, NHS number, date of birth and mother’s name and make this available to the doctor or nurse in seconds after scanning these sticky labels with a barcode reader.
This is cool for three reasons. Firstly, these sticky labels will save a lot of time for doctors and nurses as they will have the information open to them instantly rather than having to flip through charts. Secondly, the information will be displayed on a computer screen. As obvious as this sounds, this is very handy due to one simple reason: handwriting. No matter how neat it seems, most of us simply can’t read one another’s handwriting, especially not when you’re overworked, tired and sporting a fetching headache the way most of our doctors and nurses are. Thirdly, who doesn’t want a baby that looks like Hitman?
Seriously. If I had a baby, I’d want it to look like Agent 47 from Hitman. This is probably why I don’t have any kids, but that’s neither here nor there.
Ultimately, as much as we may be against the “corporate ID” side of things by sticking barcodes our babies, they are just sticky labels at the end of the day and if it means that doctors can get the information they need quicker and more precisely than they would do from someone’s squiggles, I can’t really see anything wrong with that.
