A Letter from the GAO Regarding RFID

Today I stumbled across an interesting letter. It was written two years ago, by officials at the Government Accountability Office, and sent to Secretary Rumsfeld. Essentially, the letter reveals one of the major pitfalls of active RFID solutions: failure to create procedures for staff that will allow the organization to use the tags as planned.

The Department of Defense originally planned their active RFID system under the assumption that used active tags would be sent back to the Defense Logistics Agency for re-use. Unfortunately, according to the letter:

"Army, Navy, Air Force, U.S. Transportation Command, and DLA officials informed us that few active RFID tags were being returned or reused. Army and DLA officials estimated that rates of tag returns had been 10 percent before Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and 3 percent after."

The letter lists the price of the military's RFID tags at $100 each, which means that they are spending millions of dollars each year replacing tags which were intended to be re-used.

The letter goes on to beg Secretary Rumsfeld to change DoD policy to require tags to be re-used.

The really disappointing part of this is that the military's RFID program began in 1997, and this problem wasn't reported until nearly a decade later. This goes to emphasize the importance of planning in RFID deployments, and making sure all the players have bought into the program prior to the 'go live' date.

If you are interested, you can read the letter here: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06366r.pdf

New High Speed Proof of Concept

While we have been using RFID readers to track items moving through portals, in the past RFID users have needed to observe a careful speed limit in order to ensure a 100% read rate. This week, a new proof of concept was conducted with professional motorcycle racers!

For purposes of this experiment, the race track used standard Gen 2 UHF RFID tags, antennas, readers from Alien, Inc, and software to accurately track and time eight motorcycles at speeds exceeding 140 mph. Competition-prepared motorcycles were successfully time-stamp recorded passing several read points around the racetrack, simulating realistic race situations where multiple racers pass reader checkpoints. The professional racers’ machines were equipped with a total of two of Alien’s M-Tags each.

While this was a simulation and not an actual race, the goal is to be able to use RFID to provide exact time recording for high speed vehicles.

This will make reading a forklift of a semi-truck very easy in the near future!

Fitness through Judicious RFID Use

Here's a new one for you. In the Dallas Morning News yesterday there was a great article on ways RFID is expanding from government and logistics use cases into the mainstream of consumer life. The newest use case? RFID is helping women burn calories and get in shape. Curves, which is a nationwide chain of gyms based in Waco, Texas, has implemented RFID in approximately 10% of their locations so far. At each station, a woman flashes an RFID-tagged wristband over an RFID reader on the machine. The machine reads the woman’s workout program and gives the exerciser real-time feedback on whether she’s meeting her goals for that station.

At the end of the half-hour workout, each woman's wristband is read by reader at a desktop computer which creates a graphical display of how she did overall. Muscle groups targeted, reps completed and calories burned are all stored on the RFID chip and displayed on the monitor.

Gary Heavin, founder Curves, expects high-tech workouts to be a big trend in the fitness industry. “The consumer who is looking for the next big thing is going to have a computerized personal coaching system that designs a precision workout,” Mr. Heavin said. “It gives them moment-to-moment feedback, and it gives them a monthly report card that kind of holds them accountable for their diet and attendance in a positive way.”

Paris to Tag 3 Million Books

Once again, libraries are at the forefront of the asset tracking technology using RFID. The city of Paris, France, has announced plans to implement RFID at 42 of its library branches. The libraries intend to use RFID to better manage circulation and inventory, as well as to improve security. Also, at those branches with larger numbers of patrons, the city plans to implement RFID-enabled self-service checkout and return facilities to free up staff from the circulation desk, allowing them to better serve patrons in other areas of the library. The original plan calls for at least 3 million RFID tags, as well as kiosks, readers, portals and self-checkout systems that allow customers to check out and return items, and in some cases pay fees and fines, without staff assistance.

The Paris Library system will use France's national standard for RFID formatting in library book tags. This means if a patron requests a book from a library in Paris at an RFID-enabled library in Lille, the same tracking system can be used by both libraries to track the book. France is one of four countries that have established national standards for RFID data formats, and is therefore a leader in RFID implementation. National laboratories and the retail supply chain in France are already RFID enabled.

Bonjour from Paris!

Bonjour everyone! I, your intrepid DCC blogger am abroad this week, en route to Belgium and spending time in Paris.

Paris is at once a very old and a very modern place. Everywhere I turn I see RFID in use, most notably in the transit system. As a tourist I am forced to fumble through my pockets for stashes of paper tickets with magnetic strips. I must carry large numbers of them, because once they are used, they expire two hours later, and it is very difficult to keep track of when they will expire.

Parisians, however, have RFID devices that allow them to fly from one metro station to another without digging for tickets. They run their pass across the top of the barrier, and voila! They are in. There are special entrances only they can use, assuring they don't have to waste time waiting behind people like me who are digging for tickets among the lint in their pockets.

Best wishes to everyone, and au revior!