RFID and alzhiemers

As RFID adds information to objects, it has always seemed to be a natural way to assist those with loss of memory. It seems to me a little bit oversold in this article but support for Alzhiemers patients, even if it is just by labeling their clothes is a natural way forward. Tunstall is a major player in the UK assisted living market, and this sort of approach may well add value. In fact it may be that the business model for a lot of these tools may come from the "hotel" and lifestyle side of the market rather than the purely clinical side. Certainly buying new technology that hasn't passed a clinical trial is much easier for individuals or companies than for public health organisations. Maybe this is really consumer-centric healthcare in action.

On an unrelated note, good to see 007 using RFID tagged banknotes to find the rather uninspiring villain in Quantum of Solace. Still waiting for the plotline where the rugged yet fiercly brilliant RFID researcher is the hero...

Korean news...

Just back from the APEC e-health technical forum site :http://apec.ehrc.re.kr/ some interesting work on patient identification in hospitals as well as other projects. Korea has identified RFID as a major area for development in the next 5 years (Korean Times story here ). Phone manufactures and network providers are also seeing potentil in m-health so convergence is possible. Professor Lee and the people from Yonsei University made us very welcome, hopefully this collaboration can continue.

RFID for mobile e-health for women

Somwhat of a bizzare title but reflecting the topic of a talk I'm giving at an APEC workshop. anyway news from RFID journal of a public health initiative in Dundee. Basically, Pregnant women have an ID card that gives access to welfare services. If they agree they go on a programme (Dundee Healthy Living Initiative) that measures CO in their breath, and hopefully identifies whether they have been smoking or not - this is a well-known technique . If not, they get vouchers for ASDA (a british supermarket). Apart from the obviuos joke potential, this is interesting in terms of the idea of attaching data to people, and the notion of being paid for loss of privacy. This sort of approach has been suggested in terms of internet search records, and of course happens every day with supermarket loyalty cards etc.

KORU club RFID and the Marathon

As the spouse of a Koru club member I get the chance to see how the other half lives. Recently she has recieved a small (1.5cm*1cm*2mm) sticky object to attach to her phone thatwill allow her to check -in to domestic flights by waving her phone at reader at a check-in kiosk. To me its interesting that they especially suggest sticking the tag to your phone - using the fact that mobiles are ubiquitous, without actually using the technology of the phone at all. I would be interested to know the success of this trial, in particular whether people who have koru club membership change their phone's too often to make it worthwhile.
Another ubiquitous use of RFID - The championchip RFID tag used at the Auckland marathon, added value in a number of ways - apart from giving an accurate line-crossing time (at both ends), it also also allowed the announcer to mention the names of people coming accross the finish line, as there was a reader pad around 50metres out. It also allowed video cameras to be queued to record your moment of glory/ relief. More importantly fo me it ensured the supply of a chair wher the volunteers allowed you to sit down while they removed it for you...

Cactus rustling

Somewhat bizzare story from IEEE Spectrum about using microchips - which I assume are RFID devices - to prevent theft of cactii. Interestingly, fish and animal tagging uses low frequency tags in most cases - eg products from Biomark.

NFC- what is it good for ?

A quick article in the NZ herald (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10536545) about the alcatel lucient NFC kit for home automation. The journalist (Simon Hendry) makes the point that there are no killer applications yet, and I tend to agree that home NFC - except perhaps for assisted living applications - seems a little like an application looking for a role. I'm fairly convinced that longer range RFID has the advantage even in the home as long as the system can handle the uncertainty caused by multiple objects and missed reads - one of the points made by the recent review in IEEE computer.

Sheng, Quan Z.; Li, Xue; Zeadally, Sherali, "Enabling Next-Generation RFID Applications: Solutions and Challenges," Computer , vol.41, no.9, pp.21-28, Sept. 2008
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4623217&isnumber=4623205

Source of the name "AURA"

Despite being a relatively forced acronym (AUT RFID Applications), AURA is often used to describe the "active space" around an RFID user or tag. However, Aura was a titian goddess in greek mythology, who was turned into a breeze or possibly a stream after annoying Artemis. The story is here. There is a picture of a representation of her here.

Getting RFID to work- and how to say it

Apart from the perennial question is - are they pronounced AR FID or AR-EF-EYE-DEE, one of the biggest issues for research in this area is the continuing improvement/update of "standards".
In particular tags seem to be gaining memory and range extremely quickly. This is not a problem except that range in particular is important for some of the assited living and navigation solutions we are developing. Too little range is bad, but too much range is no good either if you are trying to use RFID for navigation. The original "Where are my glasses ?" paper http://www.naccq.ac.nz/bacit/0402/2006Parry_Glasses.htm envisaged 30-100cm ranges for tags. This seems to be a little difficult to achieve with HF tags having shorter ranges and UHF tags now easily moving into 2-3 metres. Of course the power output of the reader can be changed, and one of the current projects running in the AURA lab is to look into adaptive ranging ie reducing power outputs when there are lots of tags detected and then reversing the process if nothing can be seen. Of course if you tag the person and have multiple readers thats not such a problem, but having the reader on the person has advantages in terms of cost - assuming number of people<< number of locations - and in associating objects with people.
By the way I'm a AR-EF-EYE-DEE person myself...

RFID and healthcare

This is an increasingly active area of research - particularly for tracking of patients and high value items around hospitals - It is left to the reader to determine whether patients are themselves high-value items..
In the community and primary health care arean, more attention has been focussed on tracking drugs in particulr for identifying conterfiets drugs - the FDA has a current study round in this area
http://www.fda.gov/oc/initiatives/counterfeit/rfid_cpg.html . Other work in our lab involves the use of RFID for tracking and analysing behaviour.

RFID in the news

There is an item in the NZ herald (Sat 3oth September) here about supermarkets using RFID. This is interesting as it is focused very much as a loss-prevention issue, rather than supply chain. Previously there has been some interesting work in New Zealand - published in RFID journal on the use of UHF tags to identify animals. The full pathfinder group report is here.
Not in NZ but in RFID journal there has also been some interesting work on patient monitoring in hospitals, using ultra wide band RFID. Personally, I think this sort of approach can usefully be combined with lower-tech ones such as the use of fake bus stops , and the whole panoply of assisted living technology http://www.tkn.port.ac.uk/

Hardware

Currently in the lab we have a range of RFID hardware - some Tracient UHF and RF readers, some Phidgit LF readers, and some Trossen HF readers. We also have a Skytek UHF reader and a large FEIG HF reader and some accessories. More specialised equipment includes a mobile phone NFC kit and some new Wavetrend active tags and readers. Particular thanks to Tracient for their support in terms of donations and reduced costs.

First blogs

This blog is an experiment, to see whether it is worth having a BLOG for the AUT AURA (AUT RFID Applications) laboratory. For some very old details about me see http://elena/homepages/staff/Dave-Parry/