A STUDY ON EFFICIENT APPROACHES TO

FINDING BLOOD AND PLASMA DONORS

M. Arun Manicka Raja 1, N. R Rejin Paul 2, Matcha Chandra Kiran 3,
Kolli Krishna Kumar 4, Lankipalli Nitheesh Kumar 5
1, 2
Faculty, Department of computer science and engineering, R.M.K college of engineering and technology -
601206 India
3,4,5
Student, Department of computer science and engineering, R.M.K college of engineering and technology -
601206, India
a) b) c)
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
d) e)
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract

In the realm of medicine, blood and its constituent parts are essential for preserving human life. Claiming that this
blood is necessary for any surgery on a patient and that blood plasma is utilized to treat a wide range of illnesses and
ailments. We need a blood donor because plasma is a part of blood itself, and it's challenging to find one. This essay will go
through current relevant efforts and apps for finding blood donors that we can rely on using GPS and various locating tools
[11]. The technologies involved are also covered. With the aid of this document, individuals may discover a more
dependable method of getting in touch with blood donors or blood banks, which will enable them to locate the precise blood
type they need with clinical support approving the eligibility of the donor [13].

Keywords: Blood bank, donor, plasma, AWS, machine learning

1. Introduction

A certain level of blood must be maintained in the body for a human to survive because blood makes
up about 7% of the total weight of an adult [1]. One of the vital elements of blood, plasma makes up more
than 70% of blood. When a patient is having surgery of any kind or someone needs blood after an accident,
blood banks are an essential supply of blood. The entire process of discovering donors, recruiting them,
collecting blood, storing blood, and supplying blood to a recipient is handled by blood banks in various
hospitals.
An innovative viewpoint on global health is the delivery of healthcare using electronic methods (e-
health). The use of m-health technology has made it easier to move patients' treatment out of the conventional
hospital setting and into their homes [2]. "The term blood donors encompasses donors of whole blood, red cells,
platelets, plasma, and other blood components, donated as whole blood and/or through Apheresis," the World
Health Organization (WHO) states. [2]. Blood can be donated voluntarily or based on payment, respectively.
For blood donations, the WHO has issued certain criteria. The donor must be between the ages of 18 and 65 and
must submit to a blood test to determine his or her eligibility. Blood needs specialized storage, that much is
certain. While plasma may be kept for up to a year, normal blood can only be kept for a maximum of 42 days.
so that there is less blood storage to prevent any waste in the event of death. To facilitate communication
between the donor and the receiver, we employ these applications. The majority of mobile apps and online
applications are cloud-based, and the user and customer information—including name, age, address, phone
number, and location—is saved in a database.

2. Literature Review

1,417,173,173 people called India home as of 2022, an increase of 0.68% from 2021. In India, over 11 million
blood donations are provided annually, while 13.5 million are required to service the country's 1.35 billion
inhabitants (1%)—creating a gap of nearly 2 million[3]. Only a pitiful 2.5 billion blood units, out of the
estimated 5 billion needed by our country, are accessible. Blood collection increases by 12% over four years, yet
it still falls 15% short of what is required. To meet India's expected clinical blood need, 34 out of every 1,000
eligible individuals are required to donate blood at least once per year [4]. Christian Medical College (CMC),
Vellore's Clinical Data Management Centre (CDMC) created and maintains the database used for this study. At
the Department of Biostatistics, Christian Medical College Hospital, Clinical Data Management Centre
(CDMC), Vellore, India, study data were entered and managed using the REDCap (Research Electronic Data
Capture) program. 84 percent of these blood donations, according to reports, come from unpaid, voluntary
donors [5].

The National Blood Policy and the Action Plan for Blood Safety were published by the Indian government in
2002 and 2003, respectively. Along with the creation of numerous mobile applications, one of the projects
designed to raise people's awareness is called eRaktKosh. The Hon. J. P. Nadda, Minister of Health and Family
Welfare, inaugurated this eRaktKosh on April 7, 2016. According to a government official, 4,000 individuals
have donated blood thus far, and 5,857 camps have been approved around the nation with 55,8959 donors
registered.

According to recent polls, Google Play, Apple Applications Store, Blackberry App World, and Windows
Mobile identified 188 apps, 169 of which were free, and only 45% of them allow users to share information via
social networks, which is a relatively small percentage (compared to the other app stores) helps in creating
awareness among people [7].

3. Related Work
The suggested systems addressed their connections to the donor and adjacent blood banks in the
information gathered. The Cloud Computing Based Framework for Blood Services employs MySQL database
and Azure cloud services to store data [8]. Blood banks and individuals both can make requests for blood. The
system will now notify each of the chosen donors and record their answers. If the request is accepted by the
donor, the blood need is met, and the requestor and donor can communicate. When a user registers into the
system, his name and contact details are required To authenticate the request, we employ OTP verification. A
legitimate doctor's certificate must be provided by the applicant to authenticate the request. Either the
administrator or a confirmed donor may confirm the doctor's certificate. The administrator is in charge of
examining requests and donor accounts. The papers that users upload are validated as part of the verification
process. The administrator is in charge of controlling how Users are informed about blood donation programs.
The system offers function – as – a - service, although it does not provide information about donors, to see if a
certain unit of blood is available Donor accounts that have not been used for around six months should be
terminated with a notice to ensure that requests may still be seen. Donors have the option to alert the
administrator about bogus requests, in which case the administrator will temporarily block the offending
requestor [8].

Many existing or proposed systems have similar types of functionality, with the cloud playing a key role
in maintaining applications, requests from patients and doctors needing blood, and donor information. These
systems have three roles: Provider, Requester, and Administrator, each with a function. Users must register with
their mobile phone numbers and can act as donors or requesters. Administrators should review users based on
the information and documentation provided to ensure there is no misuse of the application. These applications
use a feature called the GPS-Global Positioning System to locate the nearest donor or blood bank from the
requester.

Aishwarya R. Gowri proposed a Plasma Donor application that works as a service on AWS and taught us how
to efficiently develop a blood and plasma donation web application. It uses AWS Lambda so users can run code
without managing or deploying servers. AWS API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for
developers to build, publish, monitor, secure, and maintain APIs at any scale. It handles all the tasks associated
with accepting and handling hundreds of concurrent API calls along with traffic management, authentication,
authorization, and API version control. DynamoDB is a multi-master database used to store data. Amazon SNS
is a messaging service for communication between systems and between apps and individuals. Function as a
Service is a cloud computing model based on serverless technology and architecture. It provides a platform for
developers to run, deploy, and manage application functionality without the complexities of building and
maintaining the infrastructure associated with deploying applications. Applications developed according to this
model help enable serverless architectures [9].

Nayan Das and Asif Iqbal proposed a machine-learning approach to find the closest donor using ML
technology. Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that enables software applications to predict
outcomes more accurately. It does not have to be explicitly programmed to do so. This approach is based on
clustering, where collections of objects are grouped in such a way that objects in different clusters are grouped.
He uses two of these algorithms: K-means clustering and agglomerative clustering. The first is deployed as the
initial cluster. This cluster is created using the k-means algorithm. So the first approach is to separate these
groups of people by location by the first cluster. Each donor's location is converted to the appropriate latitude
and longitude format. Use the OpenCage Geocoder API to convert the position to geographic coordinates. The
number of clusters is automatically calculated based on the number of donors an administrator needs in a given
region. Donors who donate within 3 months will be temporarily removed from the database and given priority to
qualified donors. For plasma, the donor is disabled for 21 days after donating because she can donate plasma
every 21 days. To search for a donor, the recipient must indicate the desired location where blood or plasma is
needed and wait for a response. In response, the server sends him specific donor information. To create this last
cluster, we use agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Compare distances using geodesics. A geodesic is a
length-minimizing curve that is circular in the sphere but straight in the plane. Python has a dedicated package
for geodesics. The final cluster was selected after comparing the closest centroid of the initial k-means centroids
with the recipient's geographic coordinates. The selected cluster dataset is divided by the labels produced by
agglomerative clustering. Each label is classified from Label-0 to Label-n by comparing the distance from the
receiver to the provider. Each donor on the label must be requested to find the specific donor. Requests are made
through device notifications. If interested, forward the data to the recipient as a provider [10].
In cloud applications, there is not enough methodology to filter among donors based on their past donations. The
Machine Learning approach has much better outcomes compared to cloud applications but its main drawback is
it calculates the distance of donors based on the address given rather than his/her current location.

(Figure 1: Machine Learning architecture [10] )

Author Title Advantages Disadvantages

Name
Aishwarya R Developing a  Makes use of AWS Without reviewing the donor’s prior
Gowri [9] plasma donor storage and history of donation, an alert
application infrastructure in notification appears.
using Function parallel.
as a service in  Possesses a high
AWS computing capability
and efficient data
management.
Albert Kurian Cloud  Fulfils the patient's Does not keep any donor record and
et al [8] Computing- request using Azure makes several requests of any
Based cloud technologies. available donor.
Framework for  Locates the closest
Blood Services blood donation site
using GPS
Mr. Shreyas A Secure Cloud  Uses cutting-edge When a patient requests blood, the
Anil Computing cloud computing search process might be quite time-
Chaudhari et based technology to find consuming and is therefore delayed.
al [11] framework for donors.
Blood bank  Additionally includes a
security feature, a
government-issued ID
must be presented upon
registering.
Nayan Das et Nearest Blood  Efficiently locates the  Implementation is somewhat
al [10] and Plasma closest donor in a short challenging
Donor Finding: duration.  Uses an address to find the
A Machine  Clustering methods are closest donor rather than the
Learning used in this. donor's present location.
Approach
Muhammad Automated  Uses Efficient call use a single database and only
Arif Online blood routing technique searches among people that have
et al [14] Bank database between the donor and already registered
the recipient

4. Conclusion And Discussion

Our research found cloud-based applications to be less effective compared to machine learning approaches, as
they are easier to use and maintain, but are better suited to finding the next donor, although they are less
effective than machine learning approaches. The effort is required to implement. It is more efficient to use the
provider's current location to calculate the closest location to the requester.

5. References:
1. Blood Facts “https://www.lifelinebloodserv.org/blood-facts”

2. Ali Idri et al. “Free blood donation mobile applications” 11 July 2014
© Springer Science+BusinessMedia New York 2015

3. Zarin S Bharucha “ Voluntary blood donation by 2020, still a gap to be bridged” The Hindu
business line’ https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/specials/pulse/voluntary-blood-
donation-by-2020-still-a-gap-to-be-bridged/article30705752.ece

4. Blood donor facts https://www.friends2support.org/inner/about/blood.aspx

5. “National Estimation of blood requirement in India” by National AIDS control organization

http://naco.gov.in/sites/default/files/Final%20Estimation%20Report%20of%20Blood%20Req
uirement%20in%20India%20%281%29.pdf
6. E-Raktkosh- A centralized blood bank management system -
https://www.eraktkosh.in/BLDAHIMS/bloodbank/about.cnt#:~:text=eRaktKosh%20was%20I
naugurated%20on%207th,quantity%20of%20the%20donated%20blood.

7. Ambrosio toval et al. “Free blood donation mobile applications” 11 July 2014
© Springer Science+BusinessMedia New York 2015

8. Albert Kurian et al “cloud computing based framework for blood services”

International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 15, Number
6 (2020) pp. 609-611

9. Aishwarya R Gowri “Developing a plasma donor application using Function – as – a –

service in AWS” International
Journal of Interdisciplinary Innovative Research &Development (IJIIRD)ISSN: 2456-236X
Vol. 05 Issue 01 | 2020 050140 www.ijiird.com 171

10. Nayan Das, MD. Asif Iqbal “Nearest blood and plasma donor finding : A machine learning
approach” 2020 23rd International Conference of Computer and Information Technology
(ICCIT), 19 − 21 December 2020

11. Shreyas Anil Chaudhari et al “ A secure cloud computing framework for the blood bank”
Publication year – 2018 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8537351/references#references

12. Rishab chakrabarti et al “ Lifesaver E-blood donation app using cloud” Volume: 07
Issue:06|June2020chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.irjet.ne
t/archives/V7/i6/IRJET-V7I6735.pdf

13. Ilias Fotopoulos et al “ Cloud based information system for blood donation” Date: 17
September 2016 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_156

14. Muhammad Arif et al “ Automated online blood bank database” Date:07-09 december, 2012
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6420581