Birds and bees

Birds being frozen chickens which you could buy via the new GOOGLE android NFC electronic wallet.
 Techy details here - http://developer.android.com/reference/android/nfc/package-summary.html
Bees - 13.56 MHz RFID tag equipped  bees (

Pahl M, Zhu H, Tautz J, Zhang S, 2011 Large Scale Homing in Honeybees. PLoS ONE 6(5): e19669. )

 

NFC and Google

the NFC forum have produced a report http://www.nfc-forum.org/resources/white_papers/NFC_Smart_Posters_White_Paper.pdf on deploying NFC to make a sort of minority report-lite  environment. the Register is still skeptical but Google seems to be investing heavily in this area. Killer application still seems a way away but I don't seem able to get my phone to read QR tags so who knows !

More on RFID in fiction

RFID is becoming the deus -ex machina of choice for many TV shows - Hawaii 5-0 had  a storyline where the baddies were triathletes, and our heros were tracking them via the championchip device  complete with bleeping point on electronic map. However the dastards had swapped them and so there was more running etc. until good triumphed. Whether this increases or decreases RFID acceptability remains to be seen

some videos from the BBC

One about payments via NFC , the other about couterfeit goods tracing (or in fact legitimate goods tracing)

extreme RFID

Interesting paper from Chris Paget (http://www.tombom.co.uk/extreme_rfid.pdf) about accessing epc gen2 tags from very long ranges (100's of metres) using equipment built for less than $1000. Basically he increases the range by increasing the power of the transmitter and using a more directional antenna, thus increasing the power density in the region of the tag. You do need a ham radio operators licence to broadcast at these powers though...
This is really not new - physics is physics but the "loophole" of the ham radio licence is new.
Aside from the fact that you could use this approach to pick up Bin Ladins underpants assuming they are tagged, this may open the way to other applications - eg a foursquare-like (http://foursquare.com/) scanning RFID reader that you could install in particular locations, or long-range tracking in warehouses, assuming safety - he is using 70watts output - and regulatory compliance

RFID Live !

Report on RFID LIVE!/IEEE RFID 2010

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.

Spy in the bin

Much ado via big brother watch http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ about 2 million households in the UK having microchips in their bins. Not sure but it sounds like RFID to me.. basically the system reads the bin ID when being loaded into the rubbish truck- and hence can work out your waste weight and lead to "pay as you throw". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8550929.stm
maybe less concerned.
There does seem to be some exaggeration, the bins can't really tell if you are putting recyclicables in the normal bin and you can always put things in next doors bin. We pay for water on this basis, why not other services ?