Hospitals may look clean and sterile, but they're actually breeding grounds for dangerous bacteria that could lead to things like MRSA, a bacterial infection that's resistant to most antibiotics. Just visiting a hospital can give you a 1 in 20 chance of catching such an infection.

Over 90,000 people per year die from such diseases, and the surprising thing here is that it could all be mitigated if hospital workers practiced washing their hands regularly. But hospital workers are only human, meaning that things stress and exhaustion could make them end up skipping this step.

With the help of a little technology, workers will be forced to wash their hands when needed. And it's all thanks to RFID-enabled badges.The idea by IBM involves handing out badges that include an RFID chip to employees. The badge communicates with sensors placed in various locations throughout the building. If someone walks into a patient’s room and then tries to leave without washing their hands, the sensor sends a message to the hospital’s central server to keep track.

So far, only one hospital in Ohio has implemented this system. So either we all start petitioning other hospitals to adopt this system, or we could just demand for a robot doctor instead.

[Extreme Tech]