Singapore’s national blood service is now running on RFID. SATO has confirmed that the Health Sciences Authority’s Next-Generation Blood Supply Management System (NBSM) is operational across the HSA Blood Services Group and the blood bank laboratories of every public and private hospital in the country. It supports online ordering of blood components and tracks all of them automatically, giving HSA a single view of national stock rather than a set of separately maintained hospital inventories.
The contract was awarded to Singapore healthcare technology firm CADI Scientific after an open HSA tender, with SATO acting as technology partner and supplying the PJM RFID labels and readers underneath. CADI was founded in Singapore in 2003 and is better known locally for its SmartSense wireless temperature sensing and patient tracking systems in the public hospitals. The two companies have been taking a blood supply chain tracking offer to the Singapore market together since 2013.
HSA’s stated objectives for the NBSM are straightforward supply chain ones:
- Improve productivity across the chain from HSA to the hospitals
- Give visibility of national blood stock levels for both peacetime and emergency management
- Improve blood and patient safety through better tracking and quarantine of components
- Streamline HSA workflows and simplify component ordering for hospitals
Why a blood service reaches for HF rather than UHF
The part worth paying attention to is not that a hospital has adopted RFID. It is the frequency choice. Most supply chain RFID built in the last fifteen years is UHF RAIN RFID in the 860 to 960 MHz band, chosen for range and cheap inlays. Blood is one of the applications where that choice does not survive contact with the physics.
A unit of packed red cells or plasma is essentially a flat bag of saline-rich fluid. Water absorbs energy strongly at UHF, and the dielectric loading of a conductive liquid sitting directly behind a tag antenna shifts its resonant frequency away from the band it was designed for. The tag detunes and the absorbed energy never reaches the chip. Stack those bags in a fridge drawer and each one shadows the next. You get read rates that look fine on a bench and fall apart in a blood bank.
HF at 13.56 MHz behaves differently because it works differently. HF tags are powered by near-field inductive coupling, a magnetic rather than a radiated field, and the magnetic component passes through water largely unbothered. That is why the International Society of Blood Transfusion settled on 13.56 MHz in its 2010 guidelines for the use of RFID in transfusion medicine, alongside the practical argument that HF is available on the same terms worldwide, which matters for international transfer of blood and for disaster relief. One point of accuracy: the transfusion medicine literature around those guidelines refers to ISO/IEC 18000-3 Mode 1 tags being accepted by the ISBT and the US FDA as carriers for ISBT 128 data. SATO’s product is Mode 2, a different and non-interoperable air interface at the same frequency.
What Mode 2 actually specifies
ISO/IEC 18000-3 defines several non-interoperable modes at 13.56 MHz. Mode 1 is the familiar one, derived from ISO/IEC 15693 vicinity card technology. Mode 2 is Phase Jitter Modulation, and it is a genuinely different design.
PJM encodes data as very small perturbations in the instantaneous phase of the carrier, a variant of phase shift keying. Because the amplitude of the powering field is barely disturbed, the reader can keep transmitting full power while it listens, so the interrogator side of the link runs full duplex. The reader issues commands at 423.75 kbit/s. Tags reply by inductive coupling with subcarrier modulation at 105.9375 kbit/s, and eight reply channels are available to them. Population management uses a combination of frequency division and time division multiple access, with tags picking a channel at random and muting once identified.
That is why Mode 2 handles densely stacked populations at speed. Eight parallel reply channels plus a fast command rate means the reader is not serialising its way through a stack one tag at a time, and orientation matters far less than it does for a far-field UHF tag that needs a usable polarisation match. SATO markets the result as hundreds of tags per second and 100 per cent read accuracy on closely stacked components in any orientation, with the IC rated to minus 80 degrees Celsius for ultra-cold storage. Those are vendor figures, not independently tested ones, but the architecture is consistent with the claim.
Australian invention, Japanese owner
PJM is not a SATO invention. It came out of Magellan Technology in New South Wales, which developed the protocol in the mid 1990s and drove it through ISO, where it was published as Mode 2 in August 2004. Magellan’s early wins were orthopaedic implant loan kit tracking, reportedly 80 per cent of the Australian market, plus pathology specimen slides. SATO bought Magellan’s healthcare business and its intellectual property in late 2013, folded it into a new Australian subsidiary, SATO Vicinity, and retired the Magellan brand.
What makes the Singapore deployment notable is scale rather than novelty. SATO has been showing PJM blood management kit at ISBT congresses since at least Basel in 2019, but those are pitches. Reaching the national blood service plus every public and private hospital blood bank laboratory in a country is a different proposition, and it is the sort of reference other national blood services tend to study closely before committing.
Read more at https://www.sato-global.com/news/release/2026/20260810/
