Aksigen IVF opened a 5,000 sq ft fertility centre in Panvel, Maharashtra in September 2026, and one line in the announcement matters more than the square footage: the embryology lab runs RFID-based electronic witnessing with biometric verification, tracking biological samples through every stage of the IVF journey. The Indian fertility group says the system sits alongside manual double witnessing and digital documentation to support chain-of-custody protocols.
Electronic witnessing exists to solve one problem, and it is the worst problem an IVF laboratory can have. Gametes and embryos move between dishes, tubes, incubators and cryostorage straws over days or years, handled by several embryologists, and every transfer is a chance for one patient’s material to end up in another patient’s dish. The traditional control is a second human watching the first.
The RFID control works differently. A tag is attached to every dish, tube and straw carrying a patient’s gametes or embryos, and reader pads sit at each workstation. When a dish is placed on a pad, the reader checks that every item in the working area belongs to the same patient. A mismatch triggers a visual and audible alarm before the procedure goes ahead, and the event is logged.
Why these systems run at 13.56 MHz
Electronic witnessing systems of this class operate in the high frequency (HF) band at 13.56 MHz, and the choice is deliberate. The read field is short range and tightly bounded, so a reader sees only what is physically sitting on its pad, not a dish on the next bench. The long read range that makes UHF attractive in a warehouse would be an active liability here, where the point is proving which samples sit in one working area at one moment. Published work has also found no adverse effect on gametes or embryos from exposure to the readers, which is not a trivial box to tick when the tagged item is a human embryo. Aksigen IVF has not stated the operating frequency of the system installed at Panvel, and has not named the vendor.
Commercial electronic witnessing first appeared in 2007, driven in part by UK clinics needing to satisfy Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority requirements on specimen identification. The Panvel installation is part of its much later spread into Indian private fertility care.
What the evidence says
The most substantial published assessment is a 10-year single-centre study in Human Reproduction, published in 2023 and covering March 2011 to December 2021. It analysed 109,655 cycles (53,023 IVF and ICSI, 36,347 frozen embryo transfers, 20,285 IUI), generating 849,650 individual witnessing points.
The overall mismatch rate was 0.251% per witnessing point, equivalent to 1.944% per cycle. Critical mismatches, the ones that could have led to a sample mix-up, ran at 0.017% per witnessing point and 0.131% per cycle, being 144 events over the decade. Sperm preparation and the IVF and ICSI steps carried the highest critical rates. The system studied was RI Witness from CooperSurgical, operating at 13.56 MHz. The authors concluded that “when applied correctly, an electronic witnessing system can replace manual witnessing in the medically assisted reproduction lab to prevent sample mix-up”, while stressing that operator training and redundant manual labelling remain essential.
That caveat is why Aksigen IVF’s stated approach is the right one. Keeping manual double witnessing alongside the RFID system is the belt-and-braces model the literature recommends, not duplication for its own sake: the electronic system catches errors a tired human misses, and a human catches the tag that went onto the wrong dish to begin with, which no reader can detect. The biometric layer ties an identified operator to each witnessed event, though Aksigen has not described which modality it uses.
The clinic around the lab
The Panvel centre is part of an expansion across Navi Mumbai and Raigad. The laboratory operates within validated environmental controls and SOP-driven workflows covering fertilisation, embryo culture and cryopreservation, and services include IVF, ICSI, IMSI, preimplantation genetic testing and laser assisted hatching. The site also houses the Bharat Daftary Knowledge Centre and runs the company’s ROOTS 360 ecosystem, including electronic medical records.
Dr Gautam Daftary, Founder, Chairman and Managing Director of Aksigen IVF, said: “We have brought consultations, diagnostics, embryology, treatment and patient education together under one roof, supported by advanced technology and clinical systems.”
Centre Head Dr Varsha Patial made the point that technology alone is not the story: “Successful fertility treatment is built on much more than technology. It requires consistent laboratory quality, evidence-based clinical pathways and informed patients.” For the RFID layer that is precisely right. Tags and readers do not improve an embryo’s chance of implanting. What they remove is a class of catastrophic error from the list of things that can go wrong, the same argument that has put HF tags onto blood bags, instrument trays and specimen tracking across healthcare.
