The DCC Holiday Party

Here are some photos of our evening out!

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Santa uses RFID to Sort Out Photo Problems

Santa's house, in case you were not aware, is located in the Arctic Circle near Rovaniemi, Finland, where the North Star is overhead pretty much all the time. Every year, he gets many thousands of visitors from all over the world who meet his reindeer, explore his home, and soak up the Christmas spirit.

Although they speak many languages, the Elves were having some trouble with their photography projects. People would pay for a photo with Santa Claus, but then the Elves would have a hard time locating the photo in order to print it out.

On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer, on RFID! The elves now hand each person an RFID-enabled ticket at the point of sale for the photography line. The ticket is tracked through the photo process and associated in a database with the picture file. When the guest reaches the printing area, simply dropping their ticket on the counter causes the database to recall the correct set of photo files. :-)

Our Visit from Santa's Elf

The Dynamic Holiday party took place Friday evening after work. During our lunch, however, we had a special visitor!

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Near Field RFID testing in the Tube

London's public transportation system is one of the busiest in Europe, and all of the timetables and maps are still provided entirely on paper. This month, however, one thousand riders are testing the new VORTRIX system at the Blackfriars station. Using a phone equipped with an RF reader, passengers get information from 'smart posters' containing RFID tags, and located throughout the station. A custom application uses the phone's web browser to display exactly what trains, busses, and transfers to take in order to reach the right destination. If you don't enter a destination, it assumes you are from out of town, and suggests attractions and activities you can visit. If the test is a success, they plan to roll out to other stations, and then to integrate an RFID-based system so that passengers can pay for their fare by waving their phone.

Near field RFID is simply a different type of transmission, operating in the unregulated RF band of 13.56MHz commonly used for scientific instruments and medical devices. Near field RF devices have a much shorter range than the more ordinary RFID chips. The maximum distance a near-field device can communicate is about 8 inches. 

Great Disaster Response Solution, Texas!

This is a biased blog entry, of course. I love the idea of using RFID to track disaster evacuees. Dynamic created a publication for public health officials this fall informing them of ways RFID could help with disaster preparedness and response. So many people are afraid of RFID; I am pleased to point to yet another example of RFID harmlessly making society a better place.

If you haven't heard, Texas is going to be issuing wristbands with both barcodes and RFID tags to evacuees following a disaster. Readers on the evacuation vehicles will gather data as people enter and exit the vehicles. GPS devices on the busses will report realtime positions for each bus, and therefore all the tagged people within that bus will be tracked. The goal of the system is to help reunite families who have been separated by a disaster much more quickly, and to provide real-time location data in case loved ones cannot be immediately reunited. This should greatly relieve the distress which follows a disaster when families struggle to find one another.

The second reason I like the Texas solution is the clever way they are combining technologies. Using the bus as a container for multiple tags, and tracking a single GPS location for all the tags in the container is a great cost-saving idea, and one with a long-proven track record in the RFID world. Using container-level tracking is an old standby, and a very effective one.

Likewise, incorporating both barcodes and RFID tags in the wristbands is pretty smart, since it means that the wristband can  be read by whatever type of reader is available. This is, after all, a statewide system. There are clear benefits for using RFID in heavily populated areas, where benefits will outweigh implementation costs. Meanwhile the 20 inhabitants of Podunkville, Texas probably won't need RFID readers for their designated evacuation bus, since it would only take a few minutes to scan everyone's bar code by hand. Even so, this means Podunkville evacuees can be traced through the same system as their friends in urban Houston. Nice.