The Growing Pains of RFID
Once upon a time, the world used barcodes to track items. Starting in the 1950s, barcodes began to be applied to labels on eventually every retail consumer product manufactured. Every item had its UPC. Everybody seemed fairly happy with it.
But technology has advanced to the point of radio frequency ID tags. And, perhaps because of the time in history they came along, there's been a lot of controversy around them. Like any technology, it takes some time to get used to the idea.
What controversies? Well, there's some religions which associate RFID technology with the "Number of the Beast" if it's used on humans. There's the hacker community, who tries to point out that the technology is not fail-safe - what technology ever truly is? - and in some cases gets gagged for it. There's the activist sector who fear that too many RFID tags in everything will lead to a "Big Brother" surveillance society. And so on.
We can't reassure those who fear RFIDs for one reason or another here. All we can say is that retailers are looking for a way to track this jacket through their inventory system in the most efficient way. We want smarter gadgets that make our lives easier. And RFID technology has some really interesting potential.
RFID tags can be either passive or active. The passive tags function more like a hyper-barcode; they do nothing without a scanner nearby, and all the scanner can do is read them. But they can hold dozens of times more data than a barcode, in near-microscopic space.
The active kind open up new possibilities. These are actually a tiny little computer microchip in and of themselves, with a battery and the ability to change their data. An active RFID tag together with a temperature sensor, for instance, can tell a scanner whether the tagged has ever been stored at temperatures above or below a safety threshold. An active chip in an airplane could tell you how much nuclear radiation it had been exposed to.
Beyond the obvious uses in retail stock control, the places where RFIDs are showing up could almost fill a book:
·Passports - At least 14 industrialized nations have added RFID capability to their standard issue passports. This is a step towards security.
·Payment system - RFID cards are replacing tollbooths on motorways and bridges. You can simply drive by the reader, and it will automatically deduct the fractional fee from your account. Public transportation passes for the subway and bus systems are also using RFID payment cards.
·Sports - Racing sports of all varieties are using RFID chips to measure lap time and finish position.
·Livestock - We don't need to brand cattle anymore; now we can just plant a chip.
·Libraries - Checking library books in and out is now an automated process in most places. This goes for all forms of media, including CDs, DVDs, tapes, and software.
Other uses seem to be limited only by the imagination. One clothing retailer offered "social shopping", where RFID tags in clothing along with the customer's shopper ID combine with scanners in the fitting rooms. The result: whatever clothing the customer is trying on at the time gets blogged, with pictures, to the customer's online social network. This is popular with young teens. Another case is where a museum used the technology to interactively track visitors through the different exhibits, both to enhance their tour by playing recorded speeches and to compose a printed memoir of their experience later.
RFID technology is definitely here to stay, and it's opening up possibilities we never dreamed of earlier. Some of it may be met with less enthusiasm than other applications. And then again, we still see barcodes on every can of peas. Because sometimes, a product is just a can of peas!
Filed Under: Barcoding
