- Bulle de Linge developed its UHF Sort-Cart with built-in RFID readers to identify garments as they are picked up for laundering
- The stand-alone system is being used to ensure eldercare residents’ clothes don’t get missorted with linens.
Industrial laundry group Bulle de Linge is using an RFID solution for its retirement home customers in Europe, leveraging technology provided by RFID tech company Datamars.
Laundry company executives say it revolutionizes the laundry management process by tracking textiles in what is called the UHF Sorti-Cart. The Sorti-Cart is a customized RFID-reading trolley designed to collect and identify soiled textiles in eldercare homes. This solution targets a difficult issue in retirement homes: the loss and misplacement of residents’ personal garments during the laundry process, explained Steve Vital, field application engineer at Datamars Textile ID.
During the collection of soiled textiles, personal clothing often gets mixed with linens and towels, leading to significant losses to residents over time. The system digitizes the sorting of linens and other textiles by detecting when a resident’s personal clothing is inadvertently tossed in with facility’s own linens and towels.
Long Term Challenge
California’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program (LTCOP) reported that misplaced or stolen clothing from nursing homes is a frequent complaint. By law, every nursing home must have a written policy and program that details its procedure for responding to allegations of theft and property loss. A copy of that procedure must be given to each resident or resident’s representative when the admission contract is signed.
Preventing such losses can take place with early, automated detection, the companies said. The UHF Sorti-Cart, a mobile RFID-enabled sorting solution, is in use in Bulle de Linge laundries and in elderly homes across France, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland that use the laundry’s services. Since October 2024, it is available for purchase to senior care facilities in countries not served by Bulle de Linge.
RFID Antennas Identify Compartment Garments are In
The other developer for the Sorti-Cart was trolley supplier France Hospital. It is an RFID-enabled laundry cart featuring three distinct compartments: two for linens and towels and one for residents’ personal clothing. It has RFID reader antennas in each of two linen and towel compartment.
Typically, only resident garments are tagged with UHF RFID tags. Datamars provides UHF RFID LaundryChipsTM 403 and Bulle de Linge heat seals them directly onto individuals’ garments at its facilities. The FT403 is Datamars’ smallest UHF tag, specifically designed for private garment identification.
The trolley comes with its own onboard software to detect an RFID tag in a bin where it does not belong. That means the cart can work completely ‘standalone’ and doesn’t require any internet or ethernet connection.
“Based on the EPC code that is being read, the on-board software will understand if the tag is a personal garment and will alert the operator accordingly,” said Vital, explaning the cart’s integrated buzzer and a stack light alert the operator, enabling fast correction.
Reading Tags for Soiled Items
For the soiled sorting error detection, the RFID tags are read during the soil collection and sorting phase, as garments are carried out, room by room, by the nursing home staff using the Sorti-Cart. These tags are eventually read and recognized only when they are inadvertently placed in the bins intended for the linen.
“In fact, this customer’s [eldercare facility’s] objective is simply to avoid any misplacement of personal garments upstream, at the soil sorting stage, by preventing them from getting mixed up with the linen and getting lost,” Vital said.
The system also can be used with laundered items. Individual bags containing the garments that have been washed for each resident are read to make sure that their contents belong to the same resident. Additional readers at the laundry can be used to make sure that the right washing program is applied and that delicate textiles are processed accordingly.
Data Points
Key data points being collected for the nursing homes include the number of garments saved per resident per month with the RFID tag reads. “That is directly linked to the drastic decrease of the number of complaints (usually coming from the resident’s family) that the nursing home has to deal with,” said Vital
The Sorti-Cart’s proactive, upstream approach to sorting issues delivers tangible benefits to nursing home operators and laundry services. “It optimizes sorting operations, enhancing efficiency and minimizing downstream complications in laundry processing,” he said.
This, in turn, he added, reduces the time and effort required of nursing home staff. Beyond those benefits, Sorti-Cart impacts residents’ lives by improving satisfaction of guests and reducing distress that would have been caused by missing clothing.