What’s the winning frequency?
What’s the winning frequency?
The global Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) market is set to reach $US4.65 billion in 2007 and blow out to $US26.9 billion by 2017. From cattle to humans, boxes, key chains and weapons, you never know where RFID tags are going to turn up next.
The perfect beef burger is not just the work of a great chef, but the ability to track its origins back to birth. For an Aussie beef burger, it’s as simple as one small calf, marked with one tiny RFID tag.
There’s only one other country in the world that can track the origins of its beef as well as Australia. In Botswana any animal sold through a saleyard or abattoir must have an RFID tag so its origins can be traced within 24 hours.
“This is a food product we’re talking about here, it’s not just cattle,” says Dorothy Finlayson, president of the National Livestock ID Association and part owner of Aleis International. “There have been exceptions for cattle on large properties that were going straight to the abattoir, but that will change from July 1 this year.”
The move to tagging four-legged livestock comes from the threat of Mad Cow, Foot and Mouth and other infectious diseases with the potential to wipe out an industry. Originally, it came from the stringent policy of the European Union in letting exports through, now it’s merely a way of life and work for Australian and Botswanian cattle farmers.
But cattle is just one of the thousands of interesting and beneficial examples of RFID in practice. A whole new range of RFID applications are slowly entering the market space, with no industry sector left unturned.
Climbing the food chain: From animals to people
According to IDTechEx, a global RFID consulting, forecasting and analysis firm, the global RFID market is set to blow out to $US26.9 billion by 2017. It’s a figure that puts the technology with a hand in on almost all industry sectors.
For Teresa Henry, IDTechEx’s Australasia regional manager, RFID is a “ubiquitous enabling technology” with an impact on industry that’s comparable to the wheel or paper. “Some people consider that to be rather far fetched,” she says. “But after all, wheels extend from prayer wheels, steering wheels and wheels of fortune to aircraft wheels and microscopic wheels in micro electro mechanical systems. They are everywhere, as is paper because that appears as anything from art to toilet paper, packaging, books and origami.”
So just how ‘everywhere’ is RFID? It’s not exactly new technology, but in 2007 more and more people and business are starting to unveil the curtain on its never-ending possibilities.
Henry uses the example of the Sydney Marathon. Getting thousands of people across a finish line is as difficult as completing the marathon itself. Runners don’t start all at the same time, so it’s not as easy as checking off the clock as they finish.
Runners are timed with an electronic ‘Champion Chip,’ a purpose made bracelet worn on their right ankle. As the chip passes the start and finishing mat, the runner’s epic 42 kilometre journey is recorded. With all the sweat, blood and tears that comes with such a feat of endurance the ChampionChip needs to be able to withstand all the elements.
Designed by Texas Instruments, the ChampionChip is housed in specially designed plastic with a waterproof glass capture, worn on the runner’s shoelace. With no batteries, the transponder is passive until moved into a magnetic field, generated by a send antenna. Once there, the energising coil produces an electric current powering the chip which gives the transponder the boost it needs to transmit its unique identification number to a receive antenna. It’s a process that takes a fraction of a second, repeated continuously.
Taking unique codes to the masses
RFID can comfortably address some of the challenges facing certain industries and scenarios, yet it’s also provoking a brave new world of other applications, some intriguing and others, just wacky.
In 2007 the uptake of RFID in supply chain logistics is rapidly growing. With tags getting cheaper, goods, packages and boxes are now worthy enough to be tagged and tracked through RFID.
LogicaCMG has recently launched their Innovation Warehouse showcasing RFID technology and its potential implementations in real warehouse business scenarios. For Craig Lennard, managing director of industry, transport and distribution, the expense associated with tags is nothing compared to what they can protect.
“We’re talking less than a dollar per tag,” says Lennard. “But you have to remember these are attached to assets that might be worth somewhere between thirty and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Internationally, the auto industry is making waves with practical, and in some cases extremely creative RFID applications. In Italy, Honda has signed a landmark deal with IBM to implement RFID technology into production processes at its Atessa plant. The technology will seek to improve on efficiency and accuracy during motorcycle and scooter manufacture in an industry that sold over 12.7 million bikes during 2006.
But Mini Cooper has truly taken RFID to new levels of deployment. The manufacturer has offered RFID key fobs to over 4,500 Mini drivers in four American cities. With these keys in the ignition when they approach certain billboards, drivers can get a sense of ego-notoriety by having the sign display personalised messages.
Mini Cooper are heralding it as a new approach to mass media advertising involving billboards ‘talking to’ drivers rather then simply at them. One particular billboard in San Francisco will display the message ‘Motor on Jim!’ when Jim drives past, at other billboards he might get ‘Hi Jim, nice day for a drive’ or ‘Nice convertible Jim!’
In hospitals and medical facilities across the globe, RFID looks set to take off as a means to monitoring and recording blood supplies. Siemens says its RFID-based technology will make blood transfusions safer by monitoring not only where the sample comes from and goes but also its temperature, to maintain safe levels and minimise wastage.
For HP, RFID is best used for asset tracking in the data centre. Researchers at the HP Labs have been hard at work developing a system to monitor data centre assets in real-time, tracking and auditing servers and network equipment to monitor when and how all the data centre facets need to be updated. According to HP, this move could soon enable organisations to improve the accuracy of inventory, increase security and reduce operational and auditing costs within the data centre.
Lagging behind the frequency
While tagged cows can be found scattered across the Australian landscape, we’re still lagging behind the international spectrum when it comes to RFID implementations.
IdTechEx points to the example of tagging books, DVDs, CDs in libraries for automated stocktaking, book identification and theft prevention. Despite these clear benefits, the take-up of such processes in extremely rare in Australiasia, as is the use of RFID in the military.
Not everyone will agree with IDTechEx in comparing the advent of RFID to inventing the paper and the wheel, but its proliferation across industry sectors and the globe can surely not go unnoticed.
“The bottom line is that RFID is being used for security, safety, error prevention, anti-counterfeiting, cost reduction, increasing sales, entertainment, crime prevention, customer convenience and art and there is more to come,” says Henry.