This conference and commercial exhibition ran from 14th/17th April 2010. The IEEE conference was relatively small, with 35 papers 20 odd posters and about 100 attendees. Highlights of the conference included work on accurate range, bearing and velocity measurements for Passive RFID, work on antenna design and some work on localisation. On the commercial side the RFID in healthcare consortium workshop was well attended. In the US the main healthcare uses include equipment tracking and billing for equipment. Hospital systems tend to be active tags with indicators for location or WiFi-based. Handwash checking is becoming an important application. Vendors are still not always satisfying the customers -Aeroscout especially worrying because of interference issues (and middleware not always helpful), and the workload associated with keeping tags maintained is high when a hospital has 10000+ tags….Nobody knows how to calculate ROI
Interesting that data-processing algorithms are not very far advanced at present.
Take Home messages:
Localisation is requiring increasingly complex modelling. Multipath remains the biggest issue. Machine learning not very common (yest)
EPC GEN2 UHF tags are becoming universal – range is steadily increasing as is memory space and survivability
The Fujitsu washable tags are encouraging apparel manufacturers and retailers to begin including them in garments and in scrubs etc. Many stalls had demos running.
Middleware is a big issue – Microsoft SAP IBM all trying to get into the game ,but there is a backlash against “BIG ERP”
Ubisense ultrawideband tags give very high resolution but expensive.
DASH 7 consortium trying to get into the RTLS market
FDA still don’t know what they are doing with tags, but blood labelling via HF becoming important.
Lots of opportunities in secondary health care market.
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