More silliness

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/30/electronic_tags_for_tv_musical_chairs/
This application reminds me of a "telepresence" application to identify if people using collaborative computing systems were still actually physically present - basically it used photoresistors to see if the chair was occupied.
 More academically - starting to see activity recognition coming into the mainstream - http://www.tru-it.rutgers.edu/publications/bodynets2011.pdf
Still waiting for the NFC Iphone, but Galaxy  III works well - now want a NFC tablet !
More silliness - http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/auckland-transport-ends-snapper-contract

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.

Big Bang Theory

On the TV last night 21st October ( episode not yet on TVNZ Website )
Sheldon was busy tagging his socks with RFID so he could select the correct ones for different situations. Very similar to the "magic" bag http://www.hinz.org.nz/uploads/file/2008conference/P08.pdf . One thing I wondered was why he didn't use that technology to ensure that he didn't forget his USB stick ?

RFID on the Skifield

Apparently Whakapapa Skifield (http://www.mtruapehu.com/) in the central north island is introducing RFID -based season tickets. This could help to solve one of the biggest problems I seem to have when skiing - where were we supposed to meet ? As a snowboarder who falls down a lot and isn't as resilient as 20 years ago, I find having a mobile available often means it gets stuck in your ribs. However if the pass itself could alow you to track the locations of your party members then that would be great....

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/