The possibility of being able to continuously monitor a person’s vital signs to detect early warnings on potential abnormalities is coming. All thanks to researchers at Cornell University that have been working on a new project. For this to really get off the ground it’ll have to be as noninvasive as possible with no interference of wires and electrodes. With RFID technology that’ll be possible. Researchers have created a new touch free monitoring system that’ll be able to monitor an individual’s breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all with a RFID Tag small enough to fit in someone’s shirt pocket.

A professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University, Edwin Kan and graduate student Xiaonan Hui developed the technology. Their method relies on near-field coupling. Near-field is the region of the electromagnetic field right around an RFID Antenna with a distance of up to 35 centimeters, or one wavelength, away. Kan and Hui’s demonstrations were able to pick up an individuals’ blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing measures with a high level of accuracy. All of it was possible using a small RFID antenna and RFID tag placed within 10 centimeters of an individuals’ body, and a RFID Reader located up to two meters away. According to Hui this method increases the sensitivity and the signal quality.

In the long term there could be life changing uses that come from Kan and Hui’s research. “There are several potential real-world applications for this, such as the next generation wearable devices, smart garments, healthcare monitoring, and clinical studies,” Hui continued. “The convenience and the high performance could be particularly helpful for smart garments. Imagine if your daily garments were able to gather your vital signs directly, and then report them straight to your cell phone.”

In the short term Kan and Hui are interested in using this RFID technology in hospitals. It could be used to monitor a large number of patients without hooking them up to separate machines and devices to check their vitals. The study also showed that their system could detect up to 200 RFID tags at once, all over the same wireless communication channel.

To read more about Edwin Kan’s And Xiaonan Hui’s research, click here.

For any questions or a quote on any of your RFID needs contact us at Barcodes, Inc.

MIT researchers have developed a system that will allow small drones to read RFID tags from up to ten meters away, as well as identify the tags locations with an average error of about 19 centimeters. These researchers believe that this system could be used in large scale warehouses for both monitoring, to help prevent inventory mismatches, and to find the location of items to make it easier for employees to quickly meet customer requests. Safety won’t be an issue as these drones will be small and lightweight equipped with plastic rotors.

This will help many businesses as each year billions of dollars are lost all because of mismatches in inventory. Even the U.S. Army has had the problem of losing track of supplies.

“Between 2003 and 2011, the U.S. Army lost track of $5.8 billion of supplies among its warehouses,” says Fadel Adib, the Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, whose group at the MIT Media Lab developed the new system. “In 2016, the U.S. National Retail Federation reported that shrinkage – loss of items in retail stores – averaged around $45.2 billion annually. By enabling drones to find and localize items and equipment, this research will provide a fundamental technological advancement for solving these problems.”

Watch how the system would work below.

Interested in learning more? Read the full article here news.mit.edu.

Zebra and Confidex have worked together to develop this unique solution consisting of a redesigned ZT410 RFID printer, optimized Silverline labels and high quality Zebra ribbons. This combination provides for excellent print quality, encoding accuracy and ease of solution deployment and use. Silverline labels, now offered exclusively by Zebra, are available in three sizes to meet the needs of a wide variety of applications. When combined with Zebra’s RFID reader portfolio, the launch of Silverline enables complete Zebra RFID solutions for the most critical Enterprise Assets. For example in healthcare, hospital assets like wheel chairs, beds, oxygen canisters, IV pumps, medical diagnostic instruments, etc. can now be accurately and efficiently RFID tagged. In manufacturing, it enables tagging of tools, fixtures, metal parts, returnable containers, etc. Tagging of IT assets such as laptops, servers, tablets, etc. is another ideal use case.

Silverline Solution:
• Total Solution: Silverline RFID tags and Zebra ZT410 Silverline printer
• Provides RFID labels that work directly on all surfaces
• Prints and encodes labels for metal and liquid-filled assets
• Choose from three types of RFID labels: standard, slim and micro
• Available Globally
• Read range of up to 5m
• Reliable, flexible and scalable

Consumer satisfaction with the quality of your products is clearly important, but the service you provide before and after the sale is equally important to any business, but often overlooked as benefiting the bottom line. However, providing efficient tracking and tracing of shipped products enhances customer loyalty and your company image. Obviously, satisfied customers are a company’s greatest asset.

Track/Trace solutions including software and Automatic identification technologies such as barcoding and RFID are both reliable and effective in ensuring the efficient delivery of materials and components to you and to your customers.

According to Claes Fornell, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business and The American Customer Satisfaction Index, “As long as repeat business is important, and as long as customers have a chance to go somewhere else, employees must deliver high levels of satisfaction for a company to be successful.” In other words, satisfied customers often become repeat customers and one way to ensure satisfaction is to provide complete visibility from sale to delivery.

Simply stated, an efficient logistics supply chain accurately tracks and traces the delivered materials used to create finished products and then stores the inventory until picking, packing, shipping, and delivery of sold products are completed.

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Whether a business leapt at the opportunity to become one of the first suppliers with RFID tagged products or now finds itself currently being mandated to employ the technology, the implementation costs and the potential rewards are the same.

To maximize the benefits of RFID, it is critical to view its capability to drive business process improvement, increase supply chain efficiency and ultimately improve bottom line results. From this perspective, the up front capital costs for hardware, engineering consulting costs, opportunity costs, ongoing cost of tags and, in a manual environment, labor associated with the RFID tagging of products are deemed a necessary investment.

Rather than merely RFID tagging products to satisfy the requirements of their largest customers, companies can move from seeing RFID deployment as just the cost of doing business to an opportunity to enhance productivity and profitability. Understanding the impact of data collection and tracking as well as data integration is essential to RFID optimization.

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Tracking and managing valuable assets is major concern for many industries especially in manufacturing and warehouse environments. Whether you’re tracking a work-in-process or general inventory and assets, the greater accuracy and closer to real-time visibility you can achieve is directly connected to business success.

RFID-based systems provide an immediate and non-line of sight means to capture your inventory or asset collection. However, the most common passive RFID tags and readers have a limited range and still require a user to scan the tags or pass them through a fixed reader portal. This is where Zebra’s WhereNET active RFID solutions can provide the range that can be used over your entire facility, yielding maximum coverage.  With maximum coverage you will have real-time visibility into your entire business and operations, providing you with actionable data in order to make smarter decisions.

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Despite the explosion of online choices, customers still value seeing and touching merchandise firsthand - an experience only available to them in a brick-and-mortar store. When retailers add the cutting-edge benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to that unique advantage, they help close the all-to-common gaps in service, information and inventory of traditional retail and open more opportunities for sales and customer satisfaction.

RFID empowers retailers like never before, elevating shopping into an enriching and positive experience. With RFID as part of a total solution, retailers can greet customers by name, impress them with a wider selection of merchandise, and better serve them with faster assistance, deeper product information and more personalized promotions. What’s more, retailers can turn shopping time into social time with RFID enabled kiosks that enable customers to interact with their social network of family and friends. And when customers are ready to buy, so are retailers. RFID applications can identify merchandise, recognize loyalty accounts and facilitate mobile transactions. Even fulfilling customers’ needs is easier using RFID. Retailers gain real-time visibility into inventory, so they can expedite fulfillment of orders from closer locations. In short, RFID – along with advanced retail technology – can help keep customers happy and coming back in this intensely competitive industry.

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When you think about RFID one of your first thoughts probably isn’t how it can benefit your pet cat. Many pets today have an RFID chip in them for identification purposes but beyond that, the technology doesn’t really come into play in their day to day lives.

Ben Milliam realized that he could enhance his cat’s general curiosity and ‘mobile’ hunting drive with the aid of some RFID tagged wiffle balls and a modified electronic feeder he embedded an RFID reader in. Now his cat, Monkey, gets a taste of being an outdoor ‘hunting’ cat in the comforts of home.

You can find a detailed breakdown of Ben’s process and how be built everything on his site.

With the introduction of NFC, RFID has become a trendy technology, but is it really a necessity for your business? Let’s go over some of the differences between barcodes and RFID:

• Line of Sight – Rather than using light to collect or read a number from a barcode, radio waves are used to read a number from the RFID tag. Therefore, RFID does not require a line of sight to operate, but rather you can wave the RFID reader to read the tags.
• Multiple Item Scanning – Since RFID does not require line of sight it is not necessary to present each tag to the reader separately (as is required for barcodes); instead, all tags within the range of the reader can be read almost simultaneously as they pass the reader.
• Automation & Accuracy – Barcodes require a person to manually read each individual barcode, which can lead to manual read errors and mis-scanning. RFID, on the other hand, is a fully automated solution with a higher accuracy rate.

Although there is a huge savings in RFID technology from a resource, time and accuracy standpoint, we rarely recommend a business migrating from a completely manual process to a RFID solution. Companies that currently incorporate barcodes face the best return on investment from a RFID solution. Talk to one of our experts today to get a full assessment of your business.

Frick expands its SmartMark product line with the addition of the new WF-SM-SI01 insulator label. As electric utilities, including transmission and distribution companies, modernize power grids, many are discovering the advantages of outfitting insulators and other equipment with RFID tags and labels for future maintenance and inventory tracking purposes. Management, deployment, and replacement of insulators using RFID brings accuracy and efficiency to the process of power delivery.

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