The Smart Tag Revolution |
Radio frequency identifiers, or RFIDs, will soon link not just objects, but people too
by Derek Sankey
Imagine walking into your local supermarket on a busy Saturday afternoon. Instead of finding long line-ups of people inching forward, each transaction takes 20 seconds or less. The cashier waves a wand over each shopping cart, overflowing with the mass-produced goods and everything is instantly listed on a screen with a total price in one sweep. You pay and Leave
It might be a dream for the thousands of shoppers that battle long lines every weekend, but it’s already starting to become reality for many major retailers. Multi-billion-dollar corporations are investing in – and pushing for – radio frequency identification to become a standard in operational logistics. And it’s not just long line-ups they’re thinking about. In warehouses, pallets of new merchandise arrive and the contents of each pallet are precisely detailed with a swipe of a small
reading device.
The technology can be applied at every level of logistic operations – from the pallet level, right down to the individual product – to save money and gain efficiency. Of course, not all of those applications are economically feasible quite yet. But when major retailers and distributors such as Wal-Mart, Loblaws, Maple Leaf Foods and Staples Business Depot experiment with ways to introduce a new technology into their daily operations, you can be assured many more will jump on
the bandwagon.
A radio frequency identifier, or RFID for short, is a small, coin-sized computer chip that can be placed virtually anywhere: product labels, wristbands, even cattle tags clipped onto Alberta-raised cows. The technology isn’t new (it has been around for decades), but now it’s getting a new lease on life. Costs have dropped dramatically in the past 10 years as retailers like Wal-Mart, which is heading up the RFID charge, insists on their use at the pallet level to track inventories.
Excitement comes from the technology’s ability to talk to the world around it. An RFID can shout out, “Here I am. This is who made me. This is where I have been.” If it has been damaged, mistreated or expired, it can pass that information along too, to any receiver that is listening. The information can be transmitted over a short range, usually 15 metres of less, to a receiver or a hand-held scanner. An RFID can typically store the same amount of data that can be seen on a typewritten page, and scanners can “read” up to 1,700 RFIDs in a second. What’s more, they don’t require a battery to power them. A small antenna induces an electrical current once a radio signal hits it. The chip then “wakes up” and responds with the information encoded on it.
Such characteristics have been a source of extreme hype among technology advocates. Just at the Internet gave birth to a network of ideas, RFIDs have been touted as a force that will bring about a further evolution in networks: a network of things, all linked electronically and all with the ability to communicate with one another.
The ability to track and read everything digitally has tremendously powerful implications, says Saul Greenberg, an industrial research chair of interactive technologies at the University of Calgary. “All of a sudden we have a way of linking digital information with physical objects,” he says. “There are so many things you can do with that.”
RFIDs are already being used around the world to track and monitor a wide range of products, such as liquor bottles, clothes and credit cards. They’ve been incorporated into passports to speed up the processing of people through customs. Airline carriers have experimented with their use as a replacement to baggage tags. As technological innovations continue to drive the cost of RFIDs down, the rapid expansion of the emerging digital network seems certain.
In Alberta, the potential applications for RFIDs are wide-ranging. They’re commonly used in staff pass cards for entry into downtown office towers. The agriculture industry uses them to track and monitor livestock. And at a recent Star Trek convention in Vulcan, Calgary-based Database Information Services tested a system to track the movement of conference-goers. One of the goals is to give registered attendees a personalized RFID tag that has been encoded with the demographic information, such as age and income level. Receivers throughout the room can then track how many and what type of people visit various booths.
Despite the wide range of applications, many companies have not yet tapped into the potential RFIDs offer. They could be widely used in the construction and energy industries to monitor tools scattered around field sites, enhancing security and cutting down on theft. It is also possible – important here considering how Calgary is a major logistics and transportation hub for Western Canada – that RFID technology could soon be applied to trucks to monitor their whereabouts and protect against the tampering of cargo. “It’s not a question of whether RFIDs are useful for a particular industry,” says Greenberg, “but rather how can an industry adopt this technology in ways that are useful to them.”
Calgary-based WayFare Identifiers Inc. is one of several Alberta companies working with RFID-based tracking systems. In 2001, WayFare landed a contract producing staff authorization and identification cards for 3M Corporation. The company has since moved on to a pilot program it is conducting with aluminum producer Alcan Inc. The project incorporates RFIDs into a security monitoring system that attaches to 20,000 seagoing cargo containers for Alcan as the company ships products to clients around the world. Workers can then walk around a shipment, update the position of goods and check the security of those containers.
Cost isn’t a big factor for Alcan. The roughly $220 per cargo container it costs for WayFare’s security system – which amounts to $14 in RFID costs – pales in comparison to the $1.6 million in goods that is contained within each container. The $14 price tag for the systems RFIDs is also a bit hefty by RFID standards. Most RFIDs fall into the 15- to 20-cent price range and the grand goal is to bring the technology down to the cost of pennies. WayFare’s cost more because its design specifications are tailored to handle the harsh environment of ocean travel.
Major retailers like Wal-Mart are currently aiming at the 1.5-cent-per-RFID price point, a target that has yet to be met. “The cost and utilization of RFIDs as a whole for logistics and tracking is being driven by Wal-Mart,” says David Elderfield, founder of WayFare Identifiers. The mighty retailer started to mandate RFIDs for many of its biggest suppliers in 2004 and has been expanding that mandate ever since. “They’ve already got RFIDs on each pallet,” Elderfield says. “Once they decide the price is low enough, they’ll push it onto the label of each individual product and that will drive the price down to the penny and a half.”
Many industry watchers believe once – not when – that happens, other companies will begin to look at ways to incorporate RFIDs into their operations, thereby ushering in a new era of digital networks. The possibilities are virtually limitless. Someday soon a milk carton could be affixed with a chip that has been encoded with the product’s expiry date. As the milk sits in your fridge, it will talk to a nearby receiver that is wired to the Internet. Right before the milk is about to expire, the RFID shouts out “more milk.” That message is then relayed back to your grocery store. The next morning you wake up and a fresh carton of milk sits on your doorstep.
OK, so maybe that day is still a way off. Progress by Wal-Mart and others experimenting with the technology has been slower than hoped. According to the Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart had originally wanted 12 of its 120 distribution centres in the United States to be RFID-ready by beginning of 2006. But more than a year after that deadline had passed, only five distribution hubs and about 1,000 of the mega-corp’s 3,900 U.S. stores were part of the program. It was also reported that some of Wal-Mart’s suppliers – usually too scared to speak up against the chain on anything – were up in arms at the cost of implementing RFID systems, since they hadn’t yet seen a return on their investment.
That news doesn’t bother the many companies that believe that it is only a matter of time before RFIDs become a ubiquitous fixture in the market. Calgary-based Wireless Dynamics is turning ordinary cellphones and PDAs into RFID receivers to prepare for the future spike. Rodney Yim, operations manager for the company, says that as RFIDs become popular in coming years, the ability to turn a cellphone or personal digital assistant into an RFID scanner has strong niche prospects for areas such as health care.
Upon arriving at a hospital, for example, a patient could be given a wristband that has all their medical history encoded on it. A doctor could then scan a patient’s RFID-embedded hospital wristband to ensure the right patient is given the right medication. “Anything you can think of is possible,” says Yim. “Our idea is to deploy existing PDAs and cellphones as an RFID reader-writer.” That gives others the ability to send and receive data with the simple addition of a specialized plug-in card that attaches into a normal phone or PDA. The conversion currently costs about $150 US for the plug-in card, plus another $1,000 for the accompanying software development kit.
Wireless Dynamics plans to target emerging niche areas such as hospitals to begin with, but it sees a bigger potential market. Any company that needs to keep track of its assets could employ cellphones turned RFID receivers to scan its products, says Yim. That includes marketing companies with promotional products in the back room and liquor stores or other retailers doing monthly stockroom inventory. One day soon your cellphone might even be the keys to your car and home.
RFID technology is so simple that Greenberg teaches his computer science students at the University of Calgary how to use the tags and readers as part of his final-year courses. “I teach students how to do this in 15 minutes,” Greenberg says. “Anybody with even rudimentary knowledge can tinker with them.” That simplicity, combined with the fact that RFIDs can be woven into the daily lives of users in a way that allows them to be widely present, available and yet barely noticeable, frightens many people who worry about the privacy issues and social implications the technology might bring forth.
Several works of fiction have been already been written about a looming dystopia where people have identifiers embedded in their bodies turning them into a part of the emerging network of objects. Other detractors point to privacy issues where personal information is picked up and used by other, unfriendly receivers that are listening. There is a really dark side to all of this, Greenberg says, which needs to be addressed as the RFID concept gains ground.
Of course, thinking in terms of a network of objects will always have its critics, given the privacy and security implications. But having the ability to do something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen and whatever does unfold almost certainly will take on a direction that differs from what was initially intended. In that respect, RFIDs are similar to the electrical grid. It was first made for a single use, the light bulb, but its greater use turned out to be the power socket, serving numerous electrical devices that soon became dependent on it. One day soon RFID may also change the world in unforseen ways.
