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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1.

Role of Blood Banks in Blood Donation Blood is a vital biological product that can only be procured by donation.

Though science has made tremendous strides in a variety of areas, scientists are still decades away from producing artificial blood if possible at all. Against an annual requirement of 4 crore units of blood, India is able to collect only 40 lakh units of blood of which only million units are from voluntary blood donors while the remaining are from family/replacement donors or suffer from non-availability of blood. [1] For a safe blood service in our country, where comprehensive laboratory tests are neither possible nor pragmatic, it is best to switch over to 100% voluntary donations, as it is now established that only voluntary non-remunerated blood donation is the safest. Thus, to enhance blood safety, it is necessary to focus on motivating non-remunerated blood donors and phasing out replacement donors. [1] Blood banks have a major task of collecting blood from donors, monitor blood quality and supply, and distribute blood and blood components to hospitals within the network. The timely delivery of the required amount of blood to the donor is critical to save the life of a patient. For blood banks to achieve 100% voluntary donations, it is necessary that the blood banks maintain some sort of communication with the first time donors, because it is easier to convince someone who has already donated blood to donate again. In a populous country as India, it should be readily possible for blood supply to meet demand. But the reality is painfully different.
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1.2 Problems Faced in Blood Donation In a populous country such as India, where, if every eligible citizen can donate just one unit of blood every year, there could be surplus of blood, there exists a pathetic state where not even 10% of the demand could be met by the supply. There exists a variety of reasons for this problem. 1.2.1. Lack of Public Awareness Often, people take the availability of blood in blood banks to be granted. But the truth is that certain rare blood groups like AB- are almost always not available in the stock of blood banks and their need is usually satisfied only by family/replacement donors. Searching for a replacement donor is a tedious and time consuming process and could cost a precious life if a suitable donor cannot be found at the right time. 1.2.2. Unfounded Fears among The General Public A major reason for reluctance among blood donors are the various myths surrounding blood donation that it is not a safe process and that donating blood makes a person physically weak. On the contrary, there are no side effects due to blood donation and ironically, regular donation is found to be healthier for the donor. 1.2.3. Inability to Maintain Regular Donors Usually, blood banks collect the details of first time donors from blood donation camps and contact them again only during the time of another emergency. Thus, due to lack of constant touch with the blood bank, the first time donors lose interest in further donating blood. Also, it becomes impossible for the blood banks to acknowledge the selfless contribution of each and every donor, every time. This
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may cause a lack of satisfaction to the donor, who may refrain from any future donations. 1.2.4. Privacy Concerns of the Donor One of the major complaints of any donor in sharing his/her contact details to the blood banks is their alleged loss of privacy. Most people do not prefer to be disturbed at the time of work or holidays. And if they are continuously requested by blood banks to come and donate their blood, they may get irritated, and in some cases, they may lose any further interest in donating blood. 1.3 Need for a Website It has been noted from the previous section that vital to achieving 100% blood donations are: maintaining an optimum blood donor blood bank relationship, creating awareness among donors of the necessity for voluntary blood donation, assuring the donors that their privacy is valued and acknowledging the donors contribution by some means during every donation. In fact, the points mentioned in 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 may seem a bit contradictory: the former alleges that the blood banks do not maintain regular/proper contact with the donors, while the later alleges that they disturb the donors too much. The point to be noted is that while maintaining some kind of touch with the donors is necessary, so that the donors do not forget about the blood banks altogether, the only time the blood banks contact the donors should not be at the time of search for a replacement donor. Another point to be noted is the medium by which the blood banks should keep in touch with the donors. It is obvious that to spread awareness and to assure donor privacy, telephone contact is not the ideal way. The easiest and most
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effective means of communication that we have decided to use for this purpose is a website. Though it has its own fair share of merits and demerits, the merits outweigh the demerits by a large margin, as will be discussed later in the report. 1.4. Website Specifications The following software and scripting languages were used for creating the website: 1.4.1 Frontend The front end is responsible for collecting input in various forms from the user and processing it to conform to a specification the back end can use. In many ways, it is similar to an Operating System. The frontend of our website uses a combination of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Sequence Query Language (MySQL), JavaScript and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming languages. 1.4.2 Backend The backend of our project uses Joomla, which is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web. We have chosen Joomla because of the fact that it is an open source CMS, which would mean a wider range of flexibility and affordable features for our website.

1.5 Use of Social Networking Plug-Ins


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This project makes use of two major social networking plug-ins such as Twitter and Facebook plug-ins. This is because a major percentage of voluntary blood donors are in the age group 18-40 and it is easy to reach them through these social networking sites. Facebook alone has an estimated user base of 20 million in India and growing. Hence, to enable a larger reach for the website, the use of social plug-ins has become a necessity. 1.6 Project Outline Chapter 2 gives a brief about the literature surveys which were taken during the course of the project. Chapter 3 deals with the role of blood banks, the problems faced by them, their current method of blood collection, the problems associated with the current method of blood collection and the proposed suggestion to eliminate these problems. Chapter 4 details the proposed solution: the reasoning for the solution, the need for creation of a communication channel, the use of social networking, the features of the website and the merits and demerits of the proposed solution. Chapter 5 contains the details regarding the softwares and languages used for the site coding and the detailed explanation of various blocks. Chapter 6 explains the site test results and scope for further work in the area.

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW


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2.1

Wijai Boonyanusith, Phongchai Jittamai, "The Development of Web-

Based System for Blood Requisition within Blood Supply Chain" [1] In this paper, the authors have developed a website which has the updated value of units of blood available in the various blood banks in Thailand. Here, whenever a hospital is in need for blood, they can enter the type of blood and the website uses the distance and blood unit availability criteria to refine its search results. The paper provides a useful solution for effective blood distribution for a small country such as Thailand where the daily blood requirement is only 1500 units of blood. Hence, blood distribution is more important than blood collection. Since we deal with an Indian scenario in mind, the collection of blood is a more challenging problem. In our project, we have taken only the idea of creation of a website in mind from this paper. B. Spyropoulos, M. Botsivaly, A. Tzavaras and P. Spyropoulou,

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Towards Digital Blood-banking [4]. In this paper, a universal method to digitize blood banking has been proposed. The system is designed to record, on-line or manually, the annual human and material resources employed in a Blood-Bank that is equipment cost, reagents and disposable material consumption, building-leasing, energy, and infrastructuremaintenance expenditures, and finally manpower employed. An in house developed algorithm enables the allocation of the input resources consumption to the final Blood-products administered during the same period, in order to create a reliable cost per unit approximation. Though the system could prove advantageous in the long run, in an extremely populous country as India, it is not practically applicable.
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2.3

Ramesh Singh, Preeti Bhargava, and Samta Kain, Smart Phones to The Virtual Blood Bank project in Delhi uses smart phones to build a

the Rescue: The Virtual Blood Bank Project [5]. pervasive network that gives people instantaneous information about available blood donors in their vicinity. Donors register with the service through their mobile devices, specifying their blood type and contact information in a donor application. The General Packet Radio Service supports network communications between mobile devices and the server. The server stores information about the available blood supply in a central data repository. People who seek blood also communicate with the server through their mobile devices, specifying their blood type and current location in a subscriber application. The server matches the blood type and location with the profiles of registered donors or blood banks, retrieves the information, and sends it to the seeker via GPRS. The main problem associated with such a kind of implementation is the lack of privacy for donors. The scheme has been implemented over a small scale only and if, in the future, the donor age and gender are made publicly available for everyone, it may prove advantageous for perverts and pranksters to pull off a false alarm, trying to exploit the system. Moreover, this scheme is mainly concentrated only in finding replacement donors.
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S. Thomas, A. Osuntogun, J. Pitman, B. Mulenga, and S. Vempala, This paper describes the design and implementation of a web-based tool to

Design and Deployment of a Blood Safety Monitoring Tool [12]. monitor the collection, screening and distribution of blood in developing countries. This project makes use of a centralized database and an online interface for certified users to enter and track data. It focuses on users in 14 different countries worldwide with varying levels of internet access and technical support. It provides
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a comprehensive study of results from a usability study, formulate relevant design principles and discuss prospects for long-term sustainability. Usability testing of the initial prototype using scripts written in PHP and MySQL database tables had indicated that, in general, the application and its interface were suitably easy to use. None of the tasks were rated as difficult or very difficult by any user. Hence, for our project, we have also decided to use PHP and MySQL. It is important to note that, while this paper deals with blood testing, our project work deals with blood collection. Framework for performance engineering of workflows: a blood bank This paper addresses the performance engineering of the total information system consisting of both the information system and those who use it. The paper identifies certain critical areas where the introduction of an information system actually delayed, instead of advancing the speed of operations. For our project, we had ensured that all our project decisions do not delay any of the existing blood bank operations and hence we have confined our project only to the blood collection phase.

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case study System Sciences [13].

CHAPTER 3 BLOOD BANKS AND BLOOD COLLECTION 3.1 Introduction This chapter deals with the following topics in detail.
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Role of blood banks in blood donation. Problems faced by blood banks. Current method of blood collection and its demerits.

Suggested method for blood collection its merits and demerits.

3.2 Role of Blood Banks Blood banks face the major task of collecting, testing, storing and distributing blood and blood products. The following sections define each of these processes in detail: 3.2.1 Blood Collection Blood collection is the first function of a blood bank. It involves extracting a certain amount of blood usually around 450 ml from a voluntary donor only. Improper donor incentives and coercion, which could alter the truthfulness of some donors, are prohibited. Each individual blood donor is required to read information about blood safety and is encouraged to leave, without explanation, if he or she recognizes that giving blood would be inappropriate. This is done to eliminate donors who are at a potential risk for HIV, hepatitis and other infectious diseases from donating blood. Any donor can donate blood only once in 90 days, for health reasons. Donors are given a form to be filled and their details are collected by blood banks through this form. Most blood banks in Chennai maintain only files from which data are verified incase of any clarification in future. Only a handful of blood banks have the practice of maintain a soft copy of the details of the donors and among these, only very few blood banks actually update their soft copy every day. This is because the excessive work load on the blood banks to test, store and distribute the blood and components leave them with little time if
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any to create and update a database. Thus, blood collection operation is a disorganized process with a lot of scope for improvement in an Indian scenario.

3.2.2 Blood Testing and Component Separation: The blood thus obtained from donors is subjected to a series of 8 tests in order to ensure that it is free of infections such as HIV, Hepatitis, etc. which can be transmitted through blood transfusion. It is compulsory by Indian Law to save blood test results if any tests turn up positive results. The donors are also to be informed of the same through counselors from the blood bank, according to the National Blood Policy. If all the tests are negative, then the blood can be stored as it is or separated into components like platelets, WBCs, etc and then stored. 3.2.3 Blood Storing: The tested blood is usually stored in blood bank refrigerators of capacity 5060 standard blood bags each 450 ml in volume. The blood should be kept in blood bank refrigerator at 4-6C 2C. The expiry of the blood is normally 35/42 days, depending on the type of blood bags used. Since government has stipulated strict guidelines on blood storage, it is often a standardized procedure and cannot be changed or modified. 3.2.4 Blood and Blood Component Distribution: First In and First Out (FIFO) policy, whereby blood closer to expiry date is used first, is used in blood distribution. Patients' blood grouping and cross matching should invariably be carried out before issue of blood. A proper record of this should be kept. Blood will be distributed if and only if the seeker carries a
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doctors prescription requesting the same and a sample of the patients blood. The distribution of blood is to be carried out on a non- profit basis only, meaning the blood bank selling the blood to a person must not seek any amount more than the government prescribed rate. 3.3 Problems Faced by Blood Banks In this section, we would discuss the various problems faced by blood banks over the course of the four steps of the process of blood transfusion discussed in the previous section. It is to be noted that most problems are as a result of blood collection, which is not surprising because NACO has not stipulated any guidelines on this step. 3.3.1 Reluctance of Donors It is a sad fact that in a country as populous as India, there is a lack of availability of donors. Hence, reluctance among donors serves as the most important reason why India is suffering from an acute shortage of blood and blood packets. This reluctance stems from both fear and wrong notions about blood transfusion. 3.3.2 Inability to Retain One-Time Donors One-time donors are those donors who have donated blood for the first time during blood donation camps or along with their friends who may be regular donors. They are a great potential source of future donors: with proper guidance and motivation, they can be made aware of the great social service that they do by just allocating a few minutes of their time every 3 months. But, unfortunately, the blood banks have too many other duties to perform: to test, store and distribute blood that they do not tap into these potential future donors.
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3.3.3 Inability to Predict Demand The demand for blood is almost always unpredictable: a massive natural disaster could cause a sudden spurt in rise of the demand for blood. Even the daily requirement of blood is not constant; hence the individual blood banks usually have their own target of the number of voluntary blood donations they would like to receive per day. Even this target is difficult to reach for many blood banks. 3.3.4 Lack of Communication Between Blood Banks This is another sad problem concerning blood banks. Blood banks are not willing to share the details of the available blood units in their stock with each other: especially the government blood banks are unwilling to share their blood stock level with private ones. Such lack of cooperation also reduces the efficiency of the functioning of these blood banks. 3.3.5 Heavy Mismatch between Demand and Supply Due to all the above said reasons and more, there exists a great negative mismatch between supply and demand. This mismatch also causes a strain on the functioning of the blood banks, because often they have to turn down the request for blood for patients. 3.4. Current Method of Blood Collection From the earlier section, it is clear that the functioning of blood banks has been heavily set back due to the first step in the process: blood collection. All the other sections have been almost standardized by the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), so it would not wise to suggest changes in the functioning of the areas of blood testing, storage and distribution. Moreover, it is certain that if there were sufficient blood available in the first place, then the other problems
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become trivial. But the blood collection aspect of blood donation is an intangible one: it is not possible to know exactly how much blood is enough. More than the prospect of facing a deficit of blood, it is more disastrous for a blood bank to face a situation where they would have to dispose of the unused blood it would mean a loss of valuable time and money for the blood bank. Keeping all these factors in mind, let us see the various sources of blood collection for the various blood banks in India. 3.4.1 Voluntary Blood Donation by Regular Donors Certain regular generous donors have a habit of donating blood once in 3 months. Most of them prefer to visit a particular blood bank and sometimes, they convince a few of their friends and bring them to the blood banks as well. Some regular donors often form an unofficial group and visit blood banks as a group. Almost exclusively, these donors are the only reliable sources of assured blood supply to the blood banks.

3.4.2 VBD From Camps Blood Banks often conduct camps at various educational institutions and work places to maintain their blood collection level. Quite often students and employees genuinely participate actively in the camps and donate their blood willingly. Sometimes, the donation maybe a result of peer-pressure but what these camps ensure is a first-time exposure of blood donation to the donors. Often, it is the fear of the needle piercing the body during blood donation that keeps most donors away from donating blood. Once the donors realize that the needle piercing ritual is not as painful as they had imagined, their fear disappears and they become potential donors for further donations.
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3.4.3 Role of College Students The college students are, without doubt, the major source of blood to the blood banks. Many regular donors at the present could have started donating blood since their college days. Another reason why college students form a potential donor base is their open mindedness. Unlike any other section of the society, they are willing to donate blood with no expectations, are not afraid of donating blood due to fear or any other baseless reasons. Also, it is easy to reach college students: unlike the working class people who are not willing to be disturbed with a request for blood, college students are often willing to donate blood just at a request of a phone call or an SMS. 3.4.4 Role of Corporate Bodies The next most important source of blood donation is the working class people. But they have their own time constraints and work demands and so, it is difficult for them to be readily available for answering requests for being a replacement donor. But they form a potentially good source for voluntary donation. They readily donate blood at the times of blood camps conducted by their respective corporate bodies as well. Hence, by some means, if they could develop the habit of regularly donating blood, along with their peers at office, it could contribute a great deal to bridge the gap between blood supply and demand. What they lack is the proper drive and motivation to donate blood. 3.5 Problems in Current Method of Blood Collection From the discussion in sections 3.2 and 3.3, it has been established that the problems faced by the blood banks are mainly in the blood collection area and that by properly motivating the school and college students and the employees of the
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various corporate bodies. In this section, we will discuss the various problems faced by the blood banks in the current method of blood donation. 3.5.1 Lack of Proper Communication at Camps Blood camps happen often in educational institutions and corporate bodies where there is usually a particular time allocated for blood to be collected. And since these places are located at city outskirts, the blood banks have to carry an estimated amount of blood bags and other necessary equipments for collecting blood. Because of the lack of time and materials, the people from the blood banks are more concerned with the proper collection of blood than anything else. Hence, though there are many potential first time donors, there is not a proper means of communication between the blood banks and blood donors. In fact, the only means of communication between the two is the consent form being filled out by those who donate. Often, girl students are reluctant to share their contact information and hence it is not possible that all the information presented in these forms is completely accurate. Hence, this causes a lack of reliability of the data acquired by the blood banks from these camps. 3.5.2 Lack of Follow-Up Action to Retain Donors The forms filled out by donors during blood donation contain a question asking Are you willing to be contacted in future for donating your blood? From the response of the donors for this question, the blood banks contact the donors at the times of an emergency. Other questions like Have you donated blood before? and How many times have you donated blood? helps the blood banks assess the possible donors who would be willing to donate blood again. The more times a donor has donated their blood, the more is the possibility of him/her donating blood again. But the problem with this method of filtering is that first time donors
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are considered as a last option only that is, only after all the regular donors have been called and found to be unavailable only, does the blood banks consider calling the one-time donor. This causes the effect where the regular donors keep getting called regularly, whereas the non regular donors are usually not called. Hence the regular donor base remains at a constant level only: there is no marked increase in the rise of regular donors in any of the blood banks that we had visited in the last few years. 3.5. Proposed Suggestion Our proposed suggestion to meet this big problem faced by blood banks blood collection - is to employ the use of a website, combined with social networking features, so as to attract a large mass of people, whom in turn, can invite their friends to join our website, so as to enable a wider reach to the website. The website will focus on the need to achieve hundred percent voluntary blood donations. 3.5.1 Need for a Communication Channel between Blood Banks and Voluntary Donors From the above discussions, it is clear that there is often no means of communication between the blood banks and blood donors. The only times the blood banks contact the blood donors, are usually, at the times of an emergency. There is more chance for the donor to not agree to donate than to agree because he cannot associate himself with the blood bank or its needs. If, instead, the donor has some idea about the blood needs of the blood bank and how much his contribution is useful to the general public, then the donor will be more ready to agree to donate blood. Hence, there is a need for a channel that educates to the general public of the need for blood donation.
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3.5.2 Donor Satisfaction It is general human tendency to expect appreciation for the good that we do. Often, blood donors do not receive their due appreciation, due to a variety of reasons discussed in the previous section. This website serves as a portal to also appreciate the contribution of blood donors by thanking them each time they agree to donate. The donors can proudly post when they have donated blood in their Facebook walls. Such small things go a long way in helping achieve donor satisfaction, which is vital to ensure regular donors. 3.5.3 Donor Privacy There are a variety of websites that help people search for prospective donors in their area. But many among these publicly display the contact information of donors, which could be potentially misused. Thus, a main objective of our website is to ensure complete donor privacy - the donors contact information is displayed only if the donor is willing to display it. Also, to register into the site, one needs to compulsorily enter only their name and e-mail id. No other personal information is sought for. 3.5.4 Advantages The advantages of creating a website as the means of communication between a donor and a blood bank are: The donor can login and log out at will. Unlike phone calls and SMS, there is no actual disturbance to the blood donor. Since college students are the biggest source of voluntary blood donation, there could not be a better way than a social networking site to promote the cause of blood donation to them.
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The website contains a doubt module which can be used by the donors to post their queries regarding blood donation and to get a suitable answer. The website allows for social networking plug in, using which the donors can invite their friends in social networking sited like Facebook and twitter to join, which will help increase the reach of the website. 3.5.5 Disadvantages The disadvantages of creating a website as the means of communication between a donor and a blood bank are: The reach of Internet in India, though phenomenal, has reached only a small percentage of the total population. Penetration in rural areas could be difficult.

3.6 Conclusion Thus, in this chapter, we have discussed in detail, the roles of a blood bank and also we have mentioned that the core problem faced by blood banks is blood collection which is causing a severe deficit in the blood needs of our country. We have also emphasized on the need for awareness and motivation among the general public to donate blood. We have proposed a website as a solution for this problem. Considering that youth are the biggest source for blood donation, we have also proposed that adding a Facebook plug in to the site can help lure them in good numbers. In the succeeding chapter, we will discuss in detail about the proposed solution.
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CHAPTER 4 PROPOSED SOLUTION 4.1 Introduction This chapter discusses in detail about the proposed solution to help achieve hundred percent voluntary blood donations in our country. 4.2 Creation of a Communication Channel From the various discussions in Chapter 3, we had explained why blood collection has not improved over the years in India. One critical point of our proposed suggestion to improve the voluntary blood donation status in India was to improve the awareness and motivation among first time donors to convert them to regular donors. This necessitates a communication channel between the blood

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donors and blood banks, where the donors can get information regarding blood donation without them being disturbed. 4.2.1 Website Creation For our project, we have concluded that the best communication channel possible between blood donors and blood banks at present is a website. This decision was taken after considering a variety of other alternatives and analyzing their merits and demerits. For the website, we have used a variety of scripting languages for the frontend and Joomla for the backend. Joomla is preferred because it is an open source tool and easily updatable. A more detailed explanation of this is given in Chapter 5.

4.2.2 Other Alternatives A website is not the only means of communication possible between blood banks and donors. Usual modes of communication between the blood banks and blood donors is through a telephone call, though some new techniques employ alerting donors at times of emergency using SMS and phone calls. Other techniques like WAP pages are used put have not been considered for a variety of reasons like their low reach and less popularity. 4.2.2.1 SMS Alerts SMS alerts are an innovative way of communication. It helps to transfer information in an easy and cheap free manner. But, implementing SMS alerts so as to alert a donor of a particular blood type at times of emergency or at times of shortfall of blood in blood banks is a tedious task, if performed manually. To
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automate the process, one would need to purchase an SMS gateway, which costs a few lakhs. Moreover, there is no guarantee that an SMS would provoke any type of response from a prospective donor. 4.2.2.2 Phone Calls This is the current method of communication between blood banks and blood donors. In this system, the blood bank officials manually call and request prospective donors to come and donate blood at blood banks at times of emergency or shortfall. This time-tested method has not brought in a big wave of donors over the last few decades, though it is effective at critical times. 4.2.2.3 Motivational Speeches As clichd as it may sound, to motivate donors, the best solution is a motivational speech. Often, at blood camps, it would be good if an official from the respective blood banks offer a small introductory speech thanking the donors and motivating them to continue donating blood at regular intervals. 4.2.3 Comparison between Various Channels Now that the different communication channels have been discussed briefly, we can compare them and say that: In the area of donor awareness improvement, websites win hands down. It is difficult for anyone to imagine how blood awareness can be spread through phone calls or SMS alerts. With a website, you can show pages of information that create blood awareness and pictures and videos that help improve that effect. Motivational speeches are definitely an option, but it is a big question if people would actually

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listen or if the officials from the blood banks, in spite of their time and space constraints, would offer speeches. In the area of maintaining donor privacy, again, websites fare better if one were to consider the fact that people consider it an intrusion of their privacy if someone ought to keeping calling them or texting them, even if it were for a critical cause to the caller. If the donor wants to contact the blood banks if he were to request them to conduct blood camps at this college/work place, certainly, SMSes or phone calls are the simpler option, but organizing an event using the social networking sites has become a very popular option these days, so websites dont fare badly, either. 4.2.4 Advantages of Website Assured donor privacy no intrusion unlike phone calls or SMSes. A portal for donors to ask and clarify their doubts or fears regarding blood donation. A portal to create awareness by featuring a list of various blood banks in Chennai and their plight to ensure that blood is available at times of need. A facility to create events and groups, for friends to interact. A facility for donors to register under hospitals of their choice, thus increasing the donor base for the respective hospitals. 4.2.5 Disadvantages of Website
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Difficult to access in rural areas or areas without Internet connection. Difficult to reach people without a computer an Internet connection at their homes. Access is not instant, unlike SMS or phone calls. 4.3 Use of Social Networking The use of social networking plug ins in our website is a result of the fact that a major contributors toward blood donation are the college students and the young corporate people. To reach to those people, we have considered using social networking plug ins, so that people can invite their Facebook or Twitter friends to join our website, thus helping increase the potential donor base. 4.3.1 Significance The use of social networking is to ensure that the site reaches a larger group of people in a small time. Since lots of people are registering in social networking sites each passing day, they help giving our site a larger scope of potential donors to reach. Our site itself has many features of a social networking site: it contains a space to share blogs, ask doubts, and importantly, to learn more about blood donation. People can share the pages that they like using the social networking plug ins, thus increasing the scope of the reach of articles promoting blood donation. 4.3.2 Facebook and Twitter Plug-Ins Facebook and Twitter plug-ins help to connect any website to the respective social networking site. This immensely helps in promoting a website. For example, if a user finds an article in a site to be useful, he/she can share it with their friends through the plug-ins, thus making it reach a wider section of people.
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4.3.3 Advantages Greater reach. More base of donors. Increased popularity. 4.4 Features This section details the various features provided in our website that make it unique compared to other websites offering seemingly similar websites. 4.4.1 Donor and Hospital Profile The donor profile and hospital profiles signify the profiles provided to the donors and hospitals with different levels of control. The donor has the power to organize events, write blogs, post queries, add and remove friends, search for hospitals and join under them, search for friends, etc. The hospital profile gives hospitals the control to send messages to donors, so as to inform them of blood camps or requesting donors of a particular blood group to come and donate blood, at times of shortfall in blood stock for that group, etc. 4.4.2 Donor Privacy Assurance At the time of joining, the donor is asked whether he/she wants to share his/her contact information or not. Depending on their response, their contact information is either displayed or not displayed. Thus, unlike a few other websites, where the contact number of all donors is explicitly displayed, we try to allow for a little discretion. 4.4.3 Donor Satisfaction

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The donor is thanked each time the blood bank acknowledges his donation; he is thanked if he registers under a blood bank; he is thanked if he shares an event such as a blood camp with his friends. Such small acts strive to achieve donor satisfaction and help us reach regular donors. 4.4.4 Voluntary Donor Lists Forwarded to Hospitals After a sizable number of donors have signed up under a blood bank or after a month, whichever is earlier, we aim to send the list of donors that have agreed to donate blood at any particular blood bank of their choice. This helps the blood banks to contact the donors at times of emergency. 4.5 Advantages of the Proposed Solution Uses social networking for a noble cause. Reaches to potential untapped donor base Encourages people to invite their friends and donate blood as a group. 4.6 Disadvantages of the Proposed Solution Human motivation is an intangible factor results of the success of the reach of the website will be difficult to measure. Since we rely only on websites, we may lose out on students who do not have either computer or Internet at their homes.

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CHAPTER 5 WEBSITE SPECIFICATIONS 5.1 Introduction In this chapter, the software details involved with this project will be discussed. The core of the project is in creating a website with social networking features so as to enable the college students and young employees to join. Hence the website uses the various scripting languages and other popular tools used to
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create a website. The various features offered by the website are: Doubt Forum, Bloodix Page, Gossips Forum and Blog Forum, which would help popularizing the website. 5.2 Frontend 5.2.1 HyperText Markup Language (HTML) HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML is the basic building-blocks of webpages. The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visual or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page. HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages. Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicitly presentational HTML markup.

5.2.2 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)


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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as onscreen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. While the author of a document typically links that document to a CSS style sheet, readers can use a different style sheet, perhaps one on their own computer, to override the one the author has specified. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Internet media type (MIME type) text/css is registered for use with CSS by RFC 2318 (March 1998).
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The popularity of CSS as a design tool has increased steadily and is now regarded as the premier system for website design.

5.2.3 PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (a recursive acronym, originally personal home page) is a general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a generalpurpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as a standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms. PHP includes free and open source libraries with the core build. PHP is a fundamentally Internet-aware system with modules built in for accessing FTP servers, many database servers, embedded SQL libraries such as embedded PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite, LDAP servers, and others. Many functions familiar to C programmers such as those in the stdio family are available in the standard PHP build. PHP allows developers to write extensions in C to add functionality to the PHP language. These can then be compiled into PHP or loaded dynamically at runtime. Extensions have been written to add support for the Windows API,
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process management on Unix-like operating systems, multibyte strings (Unicode), cURL, and several popular compression formats. Some more unusual features include integration with Internet Relay Chat, dynamic generation of images and Adobe Flash content, and even speech synthesis. 5.2.4 My - Sequenced Query Language (MySQL) MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language. The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. Free-software projects that require a full-featured database management system often use MySQL. For commercial use, several paid editions are available, and offer additional functionality. Some free software project examples: Joomla, WordPress, MyBB, phpBB, Drupal and other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products, including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook. MySQL is a popular choice of database for use in web applications, and is a central component of the widely used LAMP web application software stack LAMP is an acronym for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python". MySQL is used in some of the most frequently visited web sites on the Internet, including Flickr, Nokia.com, YouTube and as previously mentioned; Wikipedia, Google and Facebook. MySQL is written in C and C++. Its SQL parser is written in yacc, and a home-brewed lexical analyzer named sql_lex.cc. MySQL works on many different
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system platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, eComStation, i5/OS, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, OS/2 Warp, QNX, Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos and Tru64. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS also exists. Many programming languages with language-specific APIs include libraries for accessing MySQL databases. The HTSQL - URL based query method ships with a MySQL adapter, allowing direct interaction between a MySQL database and any web client via structured URLs. The MySQL server and official libraries are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++.

5.2.5 Javascript JavaScript, also known as ECMAScript is a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is also considered a functional programming language like Scheme and OCaml because it has closures and supports higher-order functions. JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. This enables programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. JavaScript uses syntax influenced by that of C. JavaScript copies many names and naming conventions from Java, but the two languages are otherwise
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unrelated and have very different semantics. The key design principles within JavaScript are taken from the Self and Scheme programming languages. 5.2.6 Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name, the use of XML is not needed, and the requests need not be asynchronous. Like DHTML and LAMP, Ajax is not one technology, but a group of technologies. Ajax uses a combination of HTML and CSS to mark up and style information. The DOM is accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display, and to allow the user to interact with the information presented. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server to avoid full page reloads. In the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages; each user action required that the page be re-loaded from the server (or a new page loaded). This process is inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappears then reappears, etc. Each time a page is reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content must be re-sent instead of only the changed information. This can place additional load on the server and use excessive bandwidth. Asynchronous loading of content first became practical when Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995. These allow compiled client-side code to load data asynchronously from the web server after a
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web page is loaded. In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the iframe element to HTML, which also enabled asynchronous loading. In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari, Opera and other browsers as the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object. Microsoft has adopted the native XMLHttpRequest model as of Internet Explorer 7, though the ActiveX version is still supported. The utility of background HTTP requests to the server and asynchronous web technologies remained fairly obscure until it started appearing in full scale online applications such as Outlook Web Access (2000) and Oddpost (2002), and later, Google made a wide deployment of Ajax with Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).

5.2.7 WEB 2.0 The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by
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World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon", precisely because he intended the Web in his vision as "a collaborative medium, a place where we could all meet and read and write". He called it the "Read/Write Web" The client-side/web browser technologies used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash and the Adobe Flex framework, and JavaScript/Ajax frameworks such as Yahoo! UI Library, Dojo Toolkit, MooTools and jQuery(we have used MooTools, and jQuery). Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload. To allow users to continue to interact with the page, communications such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page (asynchronously). Otherwise, the user would have to routinely wait for the data to come back before they can do anything else on that page, just as a user has to wait for a page to complete the reload. This also increases overall performance of the site, as the sending of requests can complete quicker independent of blocking and queueing required to send data back to the client. The data fetched by an Ajax request is typically formatted in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, two widely used structured data formats. Since both of these formats are natively understood by JavaScript, a programmer can easily use them to transmit structured data in their web application. When this data is received via Ajax, the JavaScript program then uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to dynamically update the web page based on the new data, allowing for a rapid and interactive user experience. In short, using these techniques, Web designers can make their pages function like desktop applications.
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For example, Google Docs uses this technique to create a Web-based word processor. On the server side, Web 2.0 uses many of the same technologies as Web 1.0. New languages such as PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion, Perl, Python, JSP and ASP are used by developers to dynamically output data using information from files and databases. What has begun to change in Web 2.0 is the way this data is formatted. In the early days of the Internet, there was little need for different websites to communicate with each other and share data. In the new "participatory web", however, sharing data between sites has become an essential capability. To share its data with other sites, a web site must be able to generate output in machinereadable formats such as XML, RSS, and JSON. When a site's data is available in one of these formats, another website can use it to integrate a portion of that site's functionality into itself, linking the two together. When this design pattern is implemented, it ultimately leads to data that is both easier to find and more thoroughly categorized, a hallmark of the philosophy behind the Web 2.0 movement. In brief, AJAX is a key technology used to build Web 2.0 because it provides rich user experience and works any browser whether it is Firefox or Internet Explorer. Then, a language with very good web services support should be used to build Web 2.0 applications. In addition, the language used should be iterative meaning that it will help easy and fast the addition and deployment of features. 5.3 Backend 5.3.1 Joomla
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Joomla! is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It comprises a model viewcontroller (MVC) Web application framework that can also be used independently. Joomla! is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.

5.4 Using Cloud Computing Cloud computing is simply a set of pooled computing resources and services delivered over the web. When you diagram the relationships between all the elements it resembles a cloud. Cloud computingnot to be confused with grid computing, utility computing, or autonomic computinginvolves the interaction of several virtualized resources. Cloud servers connect and share information based on the level of website traffic across the entire network. Cloud computing is often provided "as a service" over the Internet, typically in the form of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS). Cloud computing customers don't have to raise the capital to purchase, manage, maintain, and scale the physical infrastructure required to handle drastic traffic fluctuations. Instead of having to invest time and money to keep their sites afloat, cloud computing customers simply pay for the resources they use, as they
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use them. This particular characteristic of cloud computingits elasticitymeans that customers no longer need to predict traffic, but can promote their sites aggressively and spontaneously. Engineering for peak traffic becomes a thing of the past. Cloud computing delivers flexible applications, web services, and IT infrastructure as a service over the Internet, using a utility pricing model. Cloud computing allows businesses to instantly scale their technology requirements to meet new demands. The Cloud is a cost-effective approach to technology because businesses don't need to make usage predictions, upfront capital investments, or over-purchase hardware or software to meet the demands of peak periods. With the right approach, cloud computing can work for any size organization. The industry has seen the highest uptake from startups and tech savvy developers, however, enterprises are starting to adopt cloud computing. Examples of this include pharmaceutical companies using the Cloud to perform drug research analysis and online retailers trying a new strategy for surges in seasonal website traffic. For this project, we have used Blue Hat Network, which provides cloud services. Blue Hat Network has been designed for website owners to easily, and instantly offload there website's static image, JavaScript and CSS files to their network for extremely fast delivery. By using a Cloud network, we enjoy the benefits of extremely fast delivery of our website's static files which will in return enhance our visitor's experience, which will ultimately increase popularity, and increase our search engine ranking. 5.5 Various Blocks and Their UML Diagrams
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Our website is a social networking site and hence it contains a range of features including blogging, questioning, gossiping, user profiles etc. These blocks have been separately coded using the various languages mentioned above. The reason why we have developed our site as a social networking site is because it allows each user to connect personally with their friends and hence, the youth, in general would be more attracted to our site than if it were in any other way. Each of these features is being explained in the form of separate blocks, as follows:

5.5.1user and Hospital Profiles

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Fig 5.1 UML Diagram User Profile Each user is provided with a profile after registration, from which he can access a variety of other blocks/features as mentioned above. She/he can update his status, create events, share videos, upload pictures, share videos, etc as mentioned above. There are two types of profiles: donor profile and hospital profile. Hospitals will have all the above mentioned features including additional features like sending messages to all donors informing them of the upcoming camps and informing when there is a certain drop in stock of any particular blood group so that the donors of that group alone can be informed through a message.

5.5.2 Bloggy

Fig 5.2 UML Diagram Blog Editor The bloggy feature enables the registered users to post their thoughts similar to the way blogger and other sites enable blogs to be posted. The user has to write her/his blog, and post it. The user has other features like changing the font type and size, adding images and posting links. The rich text editor interface is sure to attract users to blog. Blogging is one of the features that, we hope, will bring more users to our site. The conditions in blogging are that

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Only registered users can use the feature, which helps us avoid spam and malicious content being posted on the website. Users cannot post anonymously, as it may also encourage some mischievous users to post hate speeches or propagate violent or harmful behavior or to post sexually explicit content. Any users found posting such content will immediately have their accounts terminated in bloodix.com Many other features found in ordinary blogs such as attaching tags to blogs, for easier referencing in future.

For the future, we have plans where we will encourage first time donors to share their experience of donating blood, in order to motivate others to do the same.

5.5.3 Bloodix

Fig 5.3 UML Diagram Bloodix Block


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The Bloodix block is our signature block, where we encourage donors to register under a blood bank of their choice. For registration, the donor has to fill a form mentioning her/his name, e-mail id, contact number, blood group and residential address. The conditions under the Bloodix block is that Once the user registers her/his name under a blood bank, the user becomes a member of the group under the particular blood bank The user is prone to receiving bulletins at regular intervals say, once a week- in the form of messages in her/his Bloodix profile. The user also may receive notifications regarding the Blood Camps conducted by that particular blood bank. In case, she/he happens to visit at a nearby location, they can always visit and donate blood. In case the blood banks experience shortage in their blood level, they can send a message to the donors under them, requesting them to visit and donate blood at the earliest possible time.

5.5.4 Doubts

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Fig 5.4 UML Diagram Doubts Asking The figure 5.4 shows the flow of steps when a user wants to ask a doubt. Each user gets a particular number of points for asking a question. The questions are updated in the database through the web interface. All the questions asked are displayed at all times in the Doubts tab at the home page of the website. Only registered users can ask questions. Questions must not contain any explicit or provocative content.

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Fig 5.5 UML Diagram Doubts Answering

The UML diagram shown in Fig 5.5 depicts the block that explains the way doubts are answered in the Doubts block. The various points to be noted while the doubts are answered are that: Only registered users can answer questions. All the answers are displayed below the posted questions. All the answers posted to a question are saved in the database and an e-mail is sent to the person who asked the question. The asker can see the various answers and decide which the best answer for any given question is. The users get points for both answering a question and getting chosen as the one who gave the best answer. Depending on the number of points they score, the users move higher up in their levels.
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With the context of blood donation, we can allow the users to ask for doubts regarding blood donation and transfusion and let others solve it.

5.5.5 Gossips

Fig5.6 UML Diagram- Gossips Block The gossips forum enables the users to anonymously post gossips about their friends or other users. This is meant to attract the younger section of the audience. The tab is constantly checked so that no unethical gossips are posted.

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CHAPTER 6 SITE TEST RESUTS AND ANALYSIS 6.1 Site Launch and Promotion The domain name www.bloodix.com and server was purchased on 21/02/2011. Our site was tested for nearly a month before being launched on 18/03/2011. We promoted our website simply by posting status messages on our Facebook walls and encouraging our friends to join. We had also written blog posts about the purpose of our website and our experiences as we met the various blood banks in our city. We created a fan page in Facebook for our website and named it as Bloodix.com. We had also requested our friends to share the page if they found it useful to their friends as well, to make our site reach a larger mass of people. 6.2 USER PARTICIPATION Immediately after the launch of our site, there was a positive response to it: friends of us joined the site and a few of them shared it with their friends. However, there was a rise in the number of users joining the site during the first weekend. It was found that a lot of users joined the site during weekends and immediately after our blog posts were made and most of the registered users were from Chennai, which was our target. As of 25/03/2011, there are a 104 users registered with our site and almost 50 users who like our page in Facebook. This is a significant number, especially because it was achieved in a short span of time: one week. We believe that it is important to promote our site in a similar way in
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order to sustain this growth. Mere blog posts may not be useful in the long run and hence we plan to collaborate with various blood banks in and around Chennai and let our users know of their plight by posting about them in our site and the Facebook page of our site. 6.3 Contribution of Social Networking Plug-Ins Almost half the number of users has come through invitations from their friends in social networking sites. We expect this fraction to increase in the due course of time, thus helping our site to grow at a much faster rate.
6.3 Scope

for Further Work

There is a tremendous scope for innovation and improvement as far as both social networking and blood donation are concerned. Blood collection for urgent cases, such as heart transplant, where fresh blood not more than 3 hours old- can be only collected through replacement donors. Hence, for them, the site may not be useful. Other alternatives must be considered for such cases. Using an SMS portal can help the hospitals/blood banks update the dates and locations of their blood donation camps instantly through SMS to the group members under them. Involving hospital/blood bank officials to answer the doubts raised by general public can help create awareness regarding the concepts of blood donation.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION After researching in various blood banks around the city and launching our site, and promoting it for two weeks, we have arrived at the following conclusions: Voluntary blood donation is the safest way of donating blood. Blood collection is the most challenging part among the duties of a blood bank. With the immense human resources available in our country, the gap between demand and supply of blood can be bridged easily. The main reason why blood collection is low is because of the inability of the blood banks to maintain contact with one-time users due to a variety of reasons. Websites are an easy and cost efficient way for a blood bank to keep in touch with the young, literate, potential donors. Because a major percentage of the voluntary blood donors belong to the 1840 age category, using social networking plug-ins enhances the reach of our website. By collaborating with blood banks, we can post their bulletins and details of their upcoming camps in our websites, enabling interested users to go and donate at any time that they are free.

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[8] World Health Organization, Developing a National Policy and Guidelines on the Clinical Use of Blood - Recommendations, WHO, Geneva 2004. (http://www.who.int/Bloodsafety/). [9] B. Spyropoulos, M. Marinis, E. Tserepis, P. Spyropoulou, From Transfusion Supplement, Published Design and implementation status of a system supporting on-line Blood Bank regional management and operational cost monitoring, Vol. 42 p.130S, 2002. [10] Guidelines For Setting up Blood Storage Centers, Produced and published by National AIDS Control Organization, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India, June 2007 reprint. [11] National Blood Policy, Produced and published by National AIDS Control Organization, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India, June 2007 reprint. [12] S. Thomas, A. Osuntogun, J. Pitman, B. Mulenga, and S. Vempala, Design and Deployment of a Blood Safety Monitoring Tool, pp. 280, Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), 2009 International Conference, Doha.

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