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.