The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024
DASA's Blood Aid band-aid reveals your blood type in seconds — Grand Clio 2025
A band-aid with a blood-reactive layer types your blood in seconds, turning a small wound into a diagnostic and donor-recruitment moment.
DASA (Dasa Diagnósticos)
What it had to solve
In Brazil, about 40% of people don't know their own blood type, which complicates emergency care and blood-bank matching. Health diagnostics group DASA wanted blood-type information readily available to patients — and found a way to harvest it from a routine cut.
How it works
Around 40% of Brazilians don't know their own blood type — a gap that slows emergency transfusions and blood-bank matching. DASA, one of the country's largest health diagnostics and integrated health systems, wanted that information readily available to patients instead of locked inside lab tests.
The answer came from researchers at the State University of Londrina (UEL): a biocurative called Blood Aid. It looks like a normal band-aid, but a layer of synthetic fibers is impregnated with blood-reactive sera, so the moment blood touches it, the person's blood type is revealed in seconds through agglutination.
DASA and DM9 São Paulo turned the product into a campaign: the band-aid replaced ordinary ones in DASA units, and every result became a care moment — patients received literature about health traits associated with their type, were invited to sign up for blood-bank alerts, and could book further exams.
According to the university and DASA, Blood Aid impacted about 30,000 patients, with 14,000 enrolling in the blood bank and 9,000 scheduling other health exams. The campaign won the Grand Clio 2025 in Design and Bronze Lions at Cannes 2024, and UEL registered the patent with Brazil's INPI.
Why it lands
- It reframed a trivial product — the band-aid — as a diagnostic device, giving every small wound a useful medical outcome.
- It solved a real infrastructure gap: about 40% of Brazilians don't know their blood type, and the test works in remote places without labs.
- The product and the campaign fed each other: every patient interaction generated data, donor sign-ups and follow-up care.
- It was grounded in patented university research, so the idea had engineering substance, not just a clever story.
What it did
Blood Aid replaced ordinary band-aids in DASA's São Paulo units and reached around 30,000 patients: 14,000 enrolled in the blood bank and 9,000 booked additional health exams. It won the Grand Clio 2025 in Design, took Bronze Lions at Cannes 2024, and the underlying technology was patented in Brazil.
What you can take
Attach an invisible medical function to an object people already use, and the moment of injury becomes a moment of care — the product itself becomes the campaign and the data channel.
Since then
Blood Aid moved from research to real use: DASA rolled it out across its São Paulo units and reported around 30,000 impacted patients, while UEL filed a patent with Brazil's INPI and signed an agreement to commercialize the technology internationally. The campaign became one of the most decorated product ideas of the cycle — Grand Clio 2025 in Design, Bronze Lions at Cannes 2024 — and the university continued developing a home blood-typing kit similar to pharmacy glucose tests.
Sources
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