RFIDs and the Parts They Play in Enterprises

Milafel Hope Awe asked:


For a business to become truly competitive and highly efficient, it should learn to adapt with a variety of changes. One of these will be the use of technology to ensure the security of their data and to administer proper flow of operations. You can get all these and more with an RFID, or radio-frequency identification card.

Defining an RFID Tag

A tag that is considered to be an RFID will be something that you can attach to an animal, product, or even human being. The card, which can react through radio waves, contain all information for identification of the object or person it’s attached to. As to how fast it can be detected will depend on the power of the machine. Some are extremely sensitive that even if you’re meters away you can already be detected. Others will only function if you’re near the RF scanner.

There are also two components that make up the RF card. One of these is the integrated circuit, which has three functions: (1) modulates the radio signals from the RFID to the scanner and vice versa, (2) store and process information, and (3) other functions that could have been customized by the enterprise. You can also find an RFID that doesn’t have any chip attached to it, yet it still possesses some special parts that allow it to function like any circuit-based RFIDs. This one is a lot cheaper, and you can place it directly into any product.

Uses of RFID Tags in Business

So far, there are already numerous business sectors that are adapting RFIDs into their normal operations. Here are some of the uses of the RFID:

1. Better Management of Mobile Assets. Perhaps one of the greatest uses of the RFIDs is in tracking assets that are mobile. These may come in different forms. For example, there are a number of libraries that are attached RFIDs in their books, so they can monitor the people who were borrowing and still not returning them. Jewelers and renters of expensive jewelry are making use of the RFID to determine the whereabouts of their collection. Several airports and airlines, such as the Emirates, use RFIDs so they can keep track on baggage, which do often get lost while in transit. Credit card companies such as the American Express are attaching magnetic stripes on their credit cards, allowing any store to verify the identity of the cardholder instantly.

All in all, there are countless industries that are spending a lot of money on moveable assets just so they will be able to improve their services to their customers or to supply the much-needed support their internal operations may be looking for. Yet there is a very low utilization of the assets since they cannot actually monitor the real condition as well as the exact locations of some of their equipment. This will then boil down to immense financial loss at their end, as these mobile assets may not be utilized immediately or that they aren’t found at all. If equipment are in these states, they are treated as lost items and are written off from their list of assets. The companies, therefore, need to buy a new one to secure availability.

2. Security and Safety of Products. In the recent 2007 Identity Theft or Fraud Statistics Report, there are more than 3 million projected cases of credit card fraud. These could be composed of individuals whose information have been stolen for their personal gain or situations wherein credit card companies fail to keep confirm the authenticity of certain transactions of their clients. The bottom line is, when theft happens, the enterprise loses a lot.

The RFIDs become excellent support for fight against counterfeiting and identity theft. For example, there are several establishments nowadays that are attached RFIDs on their products such as DVDs and software to help determine whether the products that have been taken out of the shops have been stolen or not. If these items are legitimately bought, customer service representatives need to remove them from the items sold. On the other hand, businesspersons who consider handheld devices and their personal computers to be investments to their companies opt to make use of RFIDs so they can track and trace these goods, if ever they have been stolen by somebody else. As a matter of fact, there’s a huge possibility of recovering the items with the use of RFIDs.

When it comes to highly sensitive documents, such as those produced by a variety of financial services as well as government agencies, RFIDs can be utilized to increase security among these documents, making them difficult to access by any unauthorized person.

3. New Inventory System. The principles behind RFID have permitted for the development of the auto-ID system, which have been used by companies that are handling massive amount of inventories in their stores as well as in the warehouses. This interesting device can actually accurately monitor how much you currently have as your stocks.

Wal-Mart, one of the largest stores in the world, utilized the auto-ID system, and their academic studies have revealed that since its use the company was able to reduce the percentage of out of stocks for items that are selling from 0.1 to 15 units every day to 30 percent.

Moreover, you can also lower your maintenance and inventory costs, such as what happened in Boeing 787 Dreamliner. One of the most expensive airplanes in the world, the parts and other equipment being used are not only hard to find but are also heavily priced as well. With the use of the RFID, personnel can already kept track on these equipment regardless of their size and shape. Moreover, with the reduced maintenance needed for the airplane, there is also no more need for a lot of technicians and facilitators for Boeing. Within six months’ time, the company was able to save almost $30,000 in their labor costs.

Nevertheless, despite the benefits that enterprises may reap from the RFIDs, there are still few but major concerns that need to be addressed immediately. For one, the frequencies of RFIDs in the United States don’t work in Japan and several countries in Europe. Furthermore, there are no clear standards that govern their use and proper implementation.

rfid health chip

RFID Labels

Max Bellamy asked:


An RFID label or tag is basically an RFID (radio frequency identification) transponder that is embedded with an IC (integrated circuit) and an antenna. The IC is encrypted with a unique electronic product code (EPC) that is equivalent to an electronic lineage, setting apart the tagged item from any other in the world. When a tag goes comes within the range of an RFID reader, proprietary information is passed on through an antenna to the reader, which then feeds the data to a central computer for processing.

There are two types of RFID labels, namely inductively coupled RFID tags, and capacitively coupled RFID tags. Inductively coupled RFID tags have been used for years to track cows, railroad cars, airline luggage, and freeway tolls. There are three parts of a usual inductively coupled RFID tag, namely silicon microprocessor, metal coil, and encapsulating material. Silicon microprocessor chips differ in size, depending on their purpose. Metal coil is made of copper or aluminum wire, wound into a circular pattern on a transponder, and it acts as a tag’s antenna. The tag sends out signals to a reader, with read distance decided by the size of the coil antenna, and these coil antennas can operate at 13.56 MHz. Encapsulating material is glass or some polymer material that wraps around the chip and coil.

Inductive RFID tags are powered by the magnetic field produced by a reader. The tag’s antenna picks up magnetic energy, and the tag interacts with the reader. The tag then adjusts the magnetic field for retrieving and transmitting data back to the reader, and the reader directs that data to the host computer.

Capacitively coupled RFID tags have been manufactured in order to reduce the cost of radio-tag systems. These tags get rid of metal coil and utilize a little quantity of silicon to accomplish the same function as that of an inductively coupled tag.

A capacitively coupled tag also has three components, namely silicon microprocessor, conductive carbon ink, and paper. As far as silicon microprocessor is concerned, Motorola’s BiStatix RFID tags utilize a silicon chip that is only 3 millimeter square in area. A capacitively coupled tag can store 96 bits of information that would allow for billions of distinct numbers, and these numbers can be assigned to goods. Conductive carbon ink is a special ink that acts as the tag’s antenna. This ink is applied to the paper substrate by using usual printing techniques. A silicon chip is affixed to printed carbon-ink electrodes on the back of a paper label, to create an inexpensive, disposable tag that can be integrated on conventional product labels.

rfid health chip

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About RFID

Max Bellamy asked:


We all have of course seen James Bond attaching a small chip on an enemy’s overcoat to track the bad guy enemy. The spy-chip he used was actually the RFID system. RFID means Radio Frequency Identification method. This system uses transponders to store and remotely retrieve stored data. In the RFID method, these transponders are also known as RFID tags. Currently, RFID is used everywhere. From animal tracking to container tracking, and credit cards to library cards, we see the use of RFID. Some of the RFID applications can even remove human intervention completely.

Generally, an RFID system has tags, tag readers, servers and application software. The tags are mobile devices with digital memory chips and unique identification codes that transmit the data, which is then read by the tag reader. Further processing is done by application software according to the need.

Though relatively expensive, RFID provides the advantage of having multiple independent data sources on one chip. And when one thinks of long-term gains, RFID is the future. RFID technology not only provides greater functionality but also greater clarity. But, as every coin has two sides, RFID technology has some side effects too. The use of RFID creates the problems about the privacy of an individual. These concerns mainly rise from the RFID tags attached to products consumers buy.

Thus, great technologies like RFID must be judiciously used to enjoy the benefits from it. Once the negative issues are removed by standardization and by law then RFID will definitely be useful for mankind.

Smart RFIDs

No More Wrong Site Surgery

Maurice Ramirez asked:


In 1991, a major medical training hospital made the national news after the wrong leg was amputated twice in one week. Despite “an abundance of care” two unfortunate people entered the hospital expecting to lose one leg and walk out with a prosthesis and ended up loosing both legs and leaving in a wheelchair.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published a landmark report on patient safety titled: To Err is Human and the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) began championing the cause of patient safety and the prevention of wrong site surgery. Over the past 16 years, hospitals, doctors, nurses and many, many others have developed and implemented procedures designed to stem the rising tide of tragic errors.

In 2007 at a conference on patient safety, the CEO of JCAHO disclosed that despite tremendous effort, expense and study, the number of wrong site surgeries has risen unabated and exponentially since 1991. Every attempt to change this horrific reality has failed!

How can this be?

The title of the 1999 report summed it up: To Err is Human.

Think about modern surgery. You, the patient, are moved to an operating room. Your identification band confirms that you are the patient scheduled for surgery.

This is the first possible point of error, wrong name on the surgery schedule.

Once the operating room staff ensures you are you, the site of surgery is confirmed in the chart and marked. You may even be asked to confirm that they are marking the correct spot.

This is the next possible point of error, wrong site listed in the chart or told to you.

Once your surgery site is marked, you receive medication (if you didn’t earlier). Your surgery site is washed and “prepped” further entrenching this as the “correct side.” Then your entire body is covered by surgical drapes and other items that reduce you to an unidentifiable pile of cloth with a small window of skin.

This is an opportunity to reinforce prior error by eliminating the ability of the surgeon to recheck each of the above steps easily.

The surgeon arrives and prepares to begin cutting. The surgeon confirms that you were identified and the correct surgical site was marked. The amputation is completed and the surgery team removes the surgical drapes and discovers your diseased leg was NOT amputated!

So is there a solution?

Perhaps, imagine if you could mark the surgical site days or even weeks before surgery without risk of changing the marking. Imagine a pre-operative marking system that provided a unique identifier for the surgical site that is not affected by the process of washing, prepping and draping. Imagine a patient and surgical identifier that can be checked repeatedly from the point of admission through the pre-operative procedure, during the operation and even after the correct limb were amputated.

Impossible?

Technology has the solution. Implantable RFID chips are currently in use as unique medical record identifiers for patients and disaster responders world wide. Contrary to popular myth, there is no GPS tracking system or other privacy issue created by these passive electronic numbers.

RFID chips are biologically inert and implanted through a small needle as easily as giving an antibiotic shot. These are the ideal characteristics for a wrong site surgery solution.

Think about RFID assisted surgery. You, the patient, see your doctor weeks before the surgery. Your regular doctor has determined that you require surgery. An RFID chip is implanted in the fat of the diseased leg and you are sent to see the surgeon.

You see the surgeon several days later, but your medical records have not yet arrived. Instead of rescheduling your appointment, the surgeon scans your leg with an RFID receiver and gets your medical record number. You authorize immediate release of the medical records and your surgeon schedules surgery.

You are admitted to the hospital and the first human error occurs as your healthy leg is entered into the medical record as requiring surgery.

The day of your surgery, the second human error occurs as your roommate is moved to the operating room. Instead of amputating the wrong leg from the wrong person, your roommate is scanned for an RFID chip and the unique identifier reveals that you and your roommate received the same wristband.

You are moved to the operating room. Your identification band confirms that you are the patient scheduled for surgery. Once the operating room staff ensures you are you, the site of surgery is confirmed in the chart and marked. You may even be asked to confirm that they are marking the correct spot. The chart indicates your healthy leg is the surgery site. You have already received medication and agree as a result of the sedation.

Once your healthy leg is marked, your healthy leg is washed and “prepped” further entrenching this as the “correct side.” Then your entire body is covered by surgical drapes and other items that reduce you to an unidentifiable pile of cloth with a small window of skin.

The surgeon arrives and prepares to begin cutting when the final RFID chip scan is performed. No RFID chip can be found in the leg about to be amputated. The surgery team immediately removes all the surgical drapes and scans your diseased leg. The RFID chip is found and the correct leg is washed, prepped, draped and amputated.

Tragedy averted!

To Err is Human – RFID may be Divine

Smart RFIDs

RFID Companies

Max Bellamy asked:


In any rapidly emerging market sector, there are companies that proceed with bold plans but fail to achieve their targets. Then there are those that calmly build lucrative businesses. As far as RFID (radio frequency identification) is concerned, many companies are re-evaluating their policies after disappointment, while others are succeeding.

The internet is the best source of searching for RFID companies. Some examples are Baxtek Solutions, Datex Corporation, Kornyk Computer Solutions International, Inc., The L D S Corporation, and Miles Technologies, Inc. Productivity of RFID operations can change by market sector, label frequency, and position in the value chain. In RFID, profitability is not associated with the size of the market, but many people are attracted to the largest markets despite the success rate being low. Also, customer reluctance may cause prices to decrease.

Also, technical problems may cause an even graver situation. There is a high probability that companies having good positions with expert technology and business acquaintances will prosper. Some examples of sectors having prevalent RFID activities are airlines and airports, animals and farming, books, libraries and archiving, financial security and safety, healthcare, land and sea logistics, and postal services.

There is also an idea of disruptive technology. In management terminology, it is the latest scientific innovation, item, or service that can ultimately capsize the existing technology. At first, disruptive aids frequently perform worse, but they can control an existing market by playing a role that older technologies could not play or by improving performance. The RFID industry is presently unconcerned about printed RFID because it is not ready and cannot meet the increasingly more intricate specifications being written. However, there is a need for writing an uncomplicated specification for item level RFID, and printed electronics is likely to be the most economical. Printed RFID can be a big disruptive technology in RFID. Obviously, companies working on it would be technologically more advanced.

In general, the RFID industry complies with the laws of the marketplace and by taking them into consideration, losses can be avoided.

Smart RFIDs