A hospital laundry in Ho Chi Minh City has been handed to Vietnamese operators running an RFID system that counts how many times each surgical gown, sheet and set of patient clothing has been through the wash. The demonstration phase of the Japanese-funded project closed on 2 October 2026 at Le Van Thinh Hospital, a public hospital of more than 500 beds, after processing 72.6 tonnes of linen across more than 3,170 wash batches between June 2025 and October 2026.
The work sits under project reference F181505 of the Japanese Enterprises Proposing Program, or JEPP, a scheme run by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) that part-funds Japanese small and medium-sized firms taking proven domestic technology into an overseas market. Its full title is the Dissemination and Demonstration Project for Linen Supply Services to Improve In-Hospital Hygiene at Public Hospitals, and the Vietnamese partners are the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health and the hospital itself. Vietnamese reporting puts the value at close to 30 billion VND, roughly GBP 870,000, a figure the English-language coverage omitted.
The implementer is Watakyu Seimoa Co., Ltd of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan’s largest medical and welfare linen services group, whose president and representative director is Murata Kiyokazu. One point is worth fixing, because it has been reported loosely: the project period runs from 2019 to 2027, so the October 2026 ceremony marked the end of the demonstration phase and the handover of the line, not the end of the programme. Full commercial operation, including a new factory, is planned for 2027.
Why a wash count is a clinical number, not an inventory one
Counting cycles is the part of this deployment that deserves attention. In retail or hospitality laundry, a wash count is an asset-life figure: it tells you when a towel stops looking like a towel. In a hospital it is closer to a safety measure. Surgical gowns and drapes depend on the barrier performance of the fabric, and that performance degrades under thermal disinfection, detergent chemistry and mechanical agitation long before the item looks worn out. A gown that has been through 80 cycles and one that has been through 8 can be visually indistinguishable.
Tagging each piece and incrementing a counter every time it passes a reader turns that into evidence. Infection control can retire an item on its cycle history rather than on a supervisor’s judgement of how it looks, and the hospital can show which items were in service when.
What the sources state about the RFID, and what they do not
Every account of the project, in English and in Vietnamese, says the same thing and stops there: the RFID system tracks the number of times each textile item has been used. Tuoi Tre describes usage counts for each item being managed through the RFID system, and VnExpress says each product, including surgical gowns and patient clothing, is integrated with an RFID chip management system. No source names a tag type, an air interface frequency or a supplier, so none is reported here.
For context on what is usual rather than what is confirmed, industrial laundry tagging is overwhelmingly done with passive UHF transponders in heat-sealed or sewn-in silicone or polyester carriers, rated for hundreds of wash and press cycles and for the temperatures and pressures of a tunnel washer and an industrial ironer. The higher band is favoured because a reader tunnel or a cage portal can read a bagful of items in a single pass, which is what makes counting at batch scale practical in the first place. Watakyu operate RFID linen systems across Japan, so a transplant of their domestic set-up is the obvious inference, but it remains an inference. Murata Kiyokazu is the person who can confirm it.
The line itself
The hospital’s Laundry Centre received an automated line made up of nine types of equipment, including a multi-purpose ironer, tumble dryers and washing machines, together with heat-based disinfection and a supply of antibacterial, high-durability linen covering surgical gowns and patient clothing. Equipment and linen were handed over in April 2025, training for hospital leaders and staff followed in June 2025, and official operations began on 11 June 2025.
Already taking in work from a second hospital
Alongside its own 72.6 tonnes, the centre has processed around 2 tonnes for Thu Duc General Hospital. It is a small number and the most telling one in the announcement, because it is the business model appearing in miniature: a hospital laundry that sells capacity to its neighbours. Le Van Thinh had previously outsourced its laundry at a cost of billions of VND a year with limited control over turnaround and handling, and the hospital has said the model could be studied for replication at other suitable medical facilities.
Hospital director Tran Van Khanh gave Tuoi Tre the line that sums up the case for spending money on sheets: “even a clean bed demonstrates hospital quality”. Nguyen Hoai Nam, deputy director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health, framed the handover as part of a wider appetite for Japanese cooperation in hospital management, infection control, digital transformation and elderly care.
What is left open is the technical specification. Until the tag type, the read points and the frequency band are published, this is a confirmed wash-count application with an unconfirmed radio behind it. More on tagging in clinical settings is collected in our medical RFID coverage, and the wider cycle-counting and item-life use cases in asset tracking.
