Looks Like There Really Are 100 Uses for RFID

When ThingMagic, a company that builds embedded RFID readers and other products, launched 100 Uses of RFID, back in July, we were not completely sanguine. “Can they keep this up 95 more times?” Apparently, yes. They could.

Nearing the home stretch, the company has listed a use nearly every day for a total so far of 91 uses. In the next two weeks, they will finish up. What does it mean? That RFID is not as specialized in its uses as it might have seemed to the average consumer, as a representative list of their posts shows.

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1. Enhancing the Patient Experience with RFID: Patient ID badges hold information on his or her favorite colors, music and vacation spots, allowing them to be broadcast on the walls of patient rooms and treatment areas, while communicating important medical information on the patient to their doctors and nurses.
2. No Greenwashing Here: How RFID Helps the Environment: Using RFID in electric vehicles
3. RFID for Document Management: Embedded chips in case documents in the Florida attorney general’s office
4. RFID takes a Ride on School Busses: Know where your children are? Scanners on busses and chips in backpacks could help.
5. Cleaning Up Hazardous Materials with RFID: Cleaning up a Manhattan Project site in Tennessee, using chips to track trucks carrying radioactive materials.
6. Shredding It with Sensors: Burton Snowboards and Nokia have united to track tricks on snow and allow you to broadcast it via Twitter and other social media.
7. RFID and Mud Motors: Fine-tuning oil drilling in the wake of the BP spill.
8. RFID Lets Theme Parks Be Fun for All: Helping special-needs visitors and kids to be safe and have fun through chips and threat modeling.
9. Can You See Mi Now?: A Danish city implements battery-powered RFID readers at busy intersections to read tags in the steering columns of bike.
10. RFID Gives Surgeons Second Set of Eyes: Sensors in cancerous tumors makes surgery more exact.

To round out the list ThingMagic plans posts on point-of-sale retail applications and robotics.

The Internet of things and RFID seem like they’re not just here to stay but growing all the time. If ThingMagic’s goal was to prove that, it looks like they’ve accomplished it. But what about the future?

It’s funny you should ask. Ravi Pappu, Co-Founder and VP, Advanced Development, hazards a prediction.

“Passive sensing (RFIDS) and computation (CRFID) will make big leaps forward in the next decade. Building on platforms like the WISP, we can expect to see a proliferation of purpose-built systems where passive sensing and computation are integral to the operation of the system.”

And here’s Principal Engineer John Carrick.

“We will experience a 3x improvement in tag operational range. Three actions will contribute: 1) Continued reduction in required tag wake up power; 2) Increased complexity of RF processing on tag chip to make back scatter more detectable; 3) Improved phase noise of readers to reduce backscatter band interference.”

Or maybe you’d rather just watch a video.

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