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If you imagine that barcodes are used only on products that are sold in shops and supermarkets, you would be rather off the mark. These labels are used for many purposes as they are small but can carry lots of information not just a price of the item, can be easily scanned in restricted spaces in necessary.
Pricing of products is the most obvious and they also know the price of the product and avoid intentional or un-intentional mistake at the cash point.
The use of barcode technology for patient identification is a growing trend at many hospitals and the data stored on the barcode label can hold a lot of useful information outside of the patient’s name, address, date of birth for example. Important information such as allergies, blood groups and admission data can be easily and quickly stored using General Practioners records in advance of a patient’s admission to hospital for routine examination or surgery.
Although the barcode label is now a common sight, its invention revolutionised the way that products could be identified by the simple use of an electronic reader or scanner, Its beginnings date back to the late 1940’s when an American food retailer was hoping to find a way that food products could be automatically identified at the checkout to avoid having to price each individual item on the shelves and then manually punch the price into the cash register.
Barcodes are used on the product packaging of just about every product you buy. They are also used for inventory tracking and are used expensively in the parcel delivery service by multi-national companies the world over.
A barcode is a way of adding data or information to an item without the need for a written list of instructions. It is essentially just a set of thick and thin parallel lines which can be interpreted by a barcode scanner so that a unique code or reference can be used to attach other information to it.
We’ve seen barcodes on trees, barcodes on town signs and even barcodes on cows, but barcodes on gravestones?
A funeral director from Poole in Dorset has started to attach QR codes to gravestones to allow visitors or family members to find out more about the person laid to rest.
The QR code can be scanned by a smartphone and the website to which the user is directed contains a biography of the deceased.
New blood tracking software has been revealed by the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.
The barcode label tracking system uses software which controls the access to blood fridges and allows each barcoded unit of blood to be matched to a patient’s wristband barcode.
The system from Msoft eSolutions has been named Bloodhound and is designed to enhance patient safety.
The managing director of MSoft eSolutions said:
We all know how important barcodes can be when used in an inventory tracking system, but it seems like their use has been expanded from retail items and business items to other sectors altogether.
Trees in Whitby are to be fitted with barcode labels as part of the town’s tree assessment and inventory programme.
Barcode technology can improve accuracy of data recording and can also save company time. Scanners can read data instantly and then transmit this information wirelessly to a computer system. The need for manual data entry which can result in errors can thus be eliminated if an employer moves to a barcode scanning system.
There are certain applications in which barcode technology can be used to improve the profits and productivity of a company. These include:
We are all familiar with barcodes. These are the small sequence of lines which feature on just about every product we buy today. Barcodes are used for pricing, inventory tracking and product allocation reasons and are a firm part of our everyday lives. However they don’t have to be printed onto a product packaging at the time of manufacture, they can also be printed onto paper and these paper labels stuck onto products at any point in the product’s lifecycle.
Apple fans are waiting with baited breath for the arrival of the new operating system this autumn, with iOS 6 set to change the landscape yet again with regards to what is possible with mobile devices.
Over the past few years the ‘app’ has really taken off, with all smartphone manufacturers looking to get in on the act. It is not just Apple leading the way in terms of releasing and allowing access to applications that make things easier for their customers.