This post by Robert Scoble on Techcrunch sets off debates in many directions. Granted his point that today’s location data and personal preferences of users exist in information silos across multiple web-based and mobile-integrated services, will we see a future where all this info can be brought together seamlessly to provide an immersive experience to the user?

The other question from the perspective of consumers is whether or not it is desirable to have personal data at such a micro level on themselves, shared across a large swath of the interlocking and arguably benefits-driven social web. Will this signal the end of privacy as we understand it, ushering in an always-on, highly interconnected world where people and devices talk to each other, but in the process, leaving behind traceable electronic trails and footprints that can be mined for profit, both with their permission and surreptitiously? These are early days with respect to these technologies and the business models that are likely to win are those that balance benefits with built-in safety checks to ensure user data is not compromised.

Reading this news item in the Economic Times – “GPS has a market in India“, we, at Ennovasys, would like to offer the perspective as an Enterprise Mobility company and as a Location Based Services provider.

The article says that “…unlike developed countries where navigation was established by portable navigation devices (PNDs), followed by vehicles and then smartphones , India is witnessing a reverse trend…” and goes on to say that “In India, consumers’ first experience with navigation is likely to be on a smartphone.”

We agree with this view but only in part, in that the consumer experience of “location awareness” will certainly increase from next year onwards, but it will not necessarily be driven only by smartphones (read: GPS-enabled ones). We feel that with a larger installed base of feature phones, there will always be apps for them that can provide some basic functionality of location estimation by cell-tower triangulation and technologies like that, which may in turn result in a faster adoption of smartphones, driven by this initial sampling of what a location-based app can do.

At Ennovasys, we are positioning ourselves to ride this wave of location-based services with offerings both on the business front (Enterprise/SME) and consumer segments.

Dave Friedlos of RFID Journal reports that “Tan Tock Seng Hospital first rolled out radio frequency identification technology in 2007 to track more than 1,200 patients throughout its facility, and to be able to locate them immediately when required for testing. Now, the hospital is expanding the system to include a 3-centimeter-wide (1.2-inch-wide) active ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tag taped to a patient’s abdomen, to monitor that individual’s body temperature and detect serious infections without waking him or her.

Yong Keng Kwang, deputy director of Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s nursing service, says the hospital is one of the country’s busiest, with more than 1,200 patients at any particular time, and with a daily occupancy rate of 90 percent.

“We believed that real-time patient tracking would help remove inefficiency associated with bed allocation and inter-departmental communication, and improve patients’ access for admission,” Yong says. “Previously, bed allocation relied heavily on regular three-way communication between the bed-management unit, emergency department and wards, but with RFID, information flows between the three parties are automatic and less dependent on verbal communication.”

In 2007, Tan Tock Seng chose Singapore-based vendor Cadi Scientific to roll out the patient-tracking system as it offered local support—an important consideration when trialing new technology. Some 556 Cadi SmartNode RFID interrogators were deployed throughout the hospital, and battery-powered SmartTags operating at 868.4 MHz were added to patients’ identification bracelets in order to track those individuals as they moved around the facility.

The system provided a number of benefits, Yong indicates, from increased staff efficiency to improved communication, faster bed turnover and reduced patient waiting times.”

Again and again, we see examples of how the healthcare industry can offer superior patient care, by using RFID in hospitals and other medical facilities. This is not only about asset tracking, but also creatively deploying RFID and Sensors to eliminate time-consuming and/or error-prone manual methods of service delivery and to automate communication in a seamless manner that ensures best services to patients, while freeing up staff to carry out more important tasks. Many hospitals are now experimenting with a variety of RFID deployments in critical areas of patient care to better understand how this technology can be used in making the “patient experience” more satisfactory.

Claire Swedberg of RFID Journal says that “Oregon State University (OSU) and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, together with the Northwest Food Processors Association (NWFPA), are attempting to bring radio frequency identification to the U.S. Northwest’s food industry. The effort was launched last week with an RFID workshop and pavilion held at the NWFPA’s annual exposition in Portland, as well as the opening of a new RFID lab that is part of OSU’s Food Innovation Center. For the first time in its history, the annual NW Food Manufacturing & Packaging Expo included a workshop that described food-related RFID deployments in other regions of the country, in addition to a pavilion featuring exhibits from suppliers of RFID products and services.

“RFID is still new to the food industry,” says Connie Kirby, NWFPA’s VP of scientific technical affairs, “and our members don’t have a lot of experience with it.” As a result, she states, “there was quite a bit of curiosity about RFID among our members.”

Among the NWFPA’s 450 members are 86 food-processor companies that operate in Washington, Idaho or Oregon. These include Birdseye Foods, ConAgra, Kraft Foods and Willamette Valley Fruit Co.. Some NWFPA members have carried out pilots and tests of RFID technology (see New RFID Technology Helps Kraft, P&G, Kimberly-Clark Go the Distance), but most have had limited access to RFID educational or testing opportunities.

At the workshop, Qingyue Ling, an OSU professor of food technology, told a group of approximately 40 attendees that his vision was to educate the food industry regarding RFID. “The more I understand this technology,” Ling said, “the more I realize the need for the food industry to have education about it. What I have wanted to do is provide more interaction between the food industry and RFID suppliers.” Ling spearheaded the creation of both the Food Innovation Center’s RFID Food Application Lab, and the NWFPA Expo’s RFID workshop. The Northwest has had no university-based RFID food labs, Ling explains. The RFID Food Application Lab is equipped with a handheld interrogator, one fixed case reader mounted over a variable speed conveyor and a fixed portal interrogator for reading pallet tags. The lab also includes EPC Hotspot, a system used to help determine the optimal location for tags on a specific case, and EPC Solutions’ TagManager software to allow label printing and encoding.

At the lab, the food industry can employ RFID technology, including different kinds of readers, testing tag placement on cartons and pallets, and read performance based on conveyor speed and the type of product being tracked. Approximately 16 NWFPA members toured the 1,000-square-foot lab on Monday, Jan. 19—its opening day for educational purposes. “They got excited to see what we have set up, and what kind of service we can provide,” Ling says. “Through lab demos, it helped them to better understand what actual basic RFID components are.”

Lab demos included presentations explaining the basic components of an RFID system, how tags are read at the case, pallet and item levels, and how RFID labels are printed and encoded, as well as how a case tag can be associated with a pallet tag. Although no company has yet signed up for lab research, Ling says several companies are currently discussing the possibility with him. “Our initial service will be case- and pallet-tag placement optimization,” he notes, “and will be fee-based.” The university will utilize the lab for independent RFID tests, and starting in March, companies will also be able to use it for testing.”

Worldwide, food is a trillion dollars industry and one that is still evolving in terms of more automation, better tracking of inventory and reduced loss, wastage, spillage, spoilage etc. If even a small part of the entire food supply chain was RFID-enabled, it would help the industry better manage its processes, resulting in benefits both to manufacturers and consumers. This business can experience real, tangible and measurable ROI on its RFID-based deployments, as seen from a previous post on this industry.

Rhea Wessel of RFID Journal writes about Honda Italia “employing a combination of active and passive RFID to track components of the motorbikes it produces in what may be one of Italy’s first active ultrawide-band (UWB) RFID applications since the country’s government amended a law in early 2008 to allow for use of the technology. Italy had previously blocked the use of UWB RFID on the grounds that it could interfere with frequencies utilized by the Italian military.

The RFID application is an extension of a pilot Honda Italia implemented in mid-2007. During that pilot, the company affixed passive 13.56 MHz high-frequency (HF) tags to the motorcycles’ chassis and certain components, in order to track the assembly process.

Angelo Coletta, Honda Italia’s project manager, says the company was happy with the system designed for the first pilot, which it dubbed Ariana. However, workers were bothered by the antennas that had been installed close to the production line to enable interrogation of the passive HF tags, which have a short read range. In addition, he says, since employees had to confirm that tags were successfully interrogated during the production steps, the RFID application essentially added an additional step to the existing work process.

To eliminate this extra step, and to move antennas farther from the production line, Honda Italia switched to active tags in April 2008, launching a project it calls New Ariana, with IBM serving as systems integrator. The vehicle manufacturer now temporarily installs a UWB active tag made by Ubisense to each motorbike’s chassis. Thirteen ultrawide-band RFID readers form a tag-reading zone around the production line.

“We found that active tags were more operator-friendly,” Coletta explains.

The system enables Honda Italia to assure that the proper parts are built onto the right motorcycle frames. For instance, the company must make sure bikes shipped to the United Kingdom have the correct headlight design for that nation, where vehicles drive on the left side of the road instead of the right, as they do in the United States and continental Europe. Honda Italia can also utilize the RFID system to trace the production of individual motorcycles. Such historical production information is essential if a bike needs to be recalled for safety repairs.”

The automotive sector, just as the airlines industry, is one that could benefit tremendously from the use of RFID and other wireless technologies to track parts and critical components, since it too has a myriad of assemblies and sub-assemblies that go into the making of one unit and constant, continuous tracking of the processes is called for, to have effective plant operations. In fact, as seen in a previous post, everything right from the keys would likely have an RFID component in them that communicates with other parts and can help with everything right from self-diagnostics to product recall if something major went wrong that affected all vehicles in a particular model.

John Burnell of RFID Update reports that the “UK standards organization GS1 UK released preliminary results of a pilot project that used RFID, bar codes, the EPCIS data exchange system and a variety of international identification standards to successfully track drugs from international manufacturing facilities to a London hospital. The pilot tracked 15 different medicines, 50,000 individually identified drug packages plus their cases and pallets from manufacturers in Ireland and the Netherlands through distributors and wholesalers to receipt at Barts hospital, where they were packed into totes for tracking in the facility.

“It was all done with real medicine going to real patients,” project coordinator John Jenkins told RFID Update. “The bottom-line message is the technologies are ready for deployment. We demonstrated their ability to perform in real-world conditions.”

A major focus was to validate the ability of the EPCIS data sharing standard and communication system to provide visibility to users throughout the supply chain. All pilot participants, which included approximately 15 pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, logistics providers, technology firms, standards bodies and Barts hospital, could access the EPCIS database. “We knew where products were at any given time, so we could effect a recall almost instantly if required,” Jenkins said. “It wasn’t all easy, and I don’t want to give that impression.”

Bar code and/or RFID reads were taken to track drugs when they left their manufacturing facility, upon entry and exit at distributors, at entry to the wholesaler, when wholesalers repacked case and pallet content into totes to be placed into inventory, when assembled orders were shipped from the wholesaler, and when received at the hospital. Multiple GS1 identification standards were used for package labels, tote boxes, returnable assets, shipping labels and transport vehicles. GPS tracking was used to supplement the system to monitor shipments from the Netherlands.

Some participants used camera phones with bar code decoding software to scan Data Matrix labels. “What that shows is the reading technology needed for traceability systems is very simple, and can be low cost,” Jenkins said.

The pilot started in 2006, when GS1 UK first began recruiting participants, and will officially conclude this June. Jenkins is preparing final reports about the pilot for the European Commission, which sponsored the effort as part of its BRIDGE (Building Radio Frequency Identification for the Global Environment) project to fund and research RFID activity. More details about the pilot and a list of participants are included in the GS1 UK announcement.”

This pilot has shown that along with RFID, other wireless technologies like GPS and Mobile can be combined effectively to create a solution that addresses the needs of a huge industry like pharmaceuticals, especially when they use EPCIS and other industry standards to seamlessly share data among the various constituents. At Ennovasys, we believe in mixing and matching the right set of technologies to provide solutions that effectively address various types of business problems, with the overall goal of all-time and real-time assets visibility across the enterprise.

RFID Update has this from wealth and asset management firm Robert W. Baird & Co., that has published the January edition of RFID Monthly (updates are published on a rolling basis on its site – rfidmonthly.com), the highlights of which are:

• IT data standard creates opportunity – Potential for adoption of RFID in enterprise data centers in a wide number of vertical and horizontal markets, based on FSTC coming out with the RFID Data Center Asset Tracking Standard in December
• In 2009, we expect the year will begin slowly, but we still see growth – Expectation of increased activity in the second half of 2009, even if the economy remains sluggish, based on the industry progress made in the last year, particularly with respect to the positive ROI pilot activity that has been occurring in the past six months
• We see several key trends to look for in 2009 – Advancements in IT data centers, electronic vehicle registration and healthcare will drive RFID adoption, while the apparel industry may move more slowly even though it has a large number of pilots
• Retail shrink will likely help drive opportunity – While most of the early use case development have centered on out-of-stocks and inventory management as they have a direct impact on revenue as well as operations, loss prevention/security will come to represent a sizable problem and a good incremental RFID use case in the retail space

So, the overall message coming from a well-respected firm operating in the RFID space is that 2009 will not be that bad for the industry in spite of the global unfavorable macro-economic climate and this may well set the stage for a significant thrust in RFID-based investments by enterprises, looking to cut costs, improve productivity and increase their bottom-line.

Claire Swedberg from the RFID Journal reports that “St. Joseph’s, the N.Y. hospital is using an AeroScout solution to track the temperatures inside its refrigerators, thereby reducing labor costs and improving the safety of the blood, vaccines and other items stored within.”

She further says “To track temperatures in refrigerators that store blood, tissues, organs and vaccines, staff members at St. Joseph’s Hospital Healthcare Center, located in Syracuse, N.Y., had been taking time out of their schedules to read temperature sensors in each refrigerator several times per day, and to manually record the results on a piece of paper. Although these efforts took only a few minutes, they were carried out multiple times every day with more than 300 refrigerators, by highly paid employees whose primary job is to provide health services to patients.

In December 2008, St. Joseph’s began switching to an RFID-based system, provided by NEC Unified Solutions and using AeroScout’s Temperature Monitoring System in conjunction with the hospital’s existing Cisco Unified wireless infrastructure. As the sensors collect data from the refrigerators, they transmit that information to software that can then alert the hospital’s staff if the temperature deviates from acceptable levels.

St. Joseph’s comprises one main hospital campus and 22 remote locations, each of which has refrigerators that must be managed. Since 2007, the Joint Commission, an independent, nonprofit organization that certifies and accredits hospitals, has required all health-care facilities to provide temperature records for refrigerators that store such temperature-sensitive products as blood, vaccines or pharmaceuticals. According to Chuck Fennell, chief information officer of St. Joseph’s, the hospital undertakes the record-keeping not only to satisfy those rules, but also as a safety precaution to ensure blood, tissues, organs and vaccines do not become too warm due to a door being left open, the electric power failing or a compressor breaking.

Having health-care employees monitor those temperatures, Fennell says, is “not a good use of their time.” While the hospital was already utilizing wired sensors in several refrigerators, it was unrealistic to expand a wired system throughout all 23 of its locations. Fennell says he met with NEC, which partners with AeroScout, and developed the new solution for St. Joseph’s using sensor nodes consisting of a battery-powered 2.4 GHz RFID tag that complies with the IEEE Wi-Fi standards and contains a built-in temperature sensor; AeroScout’s MobileView RFID software, which can transmit temperature alerts and translate sensor node data into temperature records; and the hospital’s own existing Wi-Fi system, which St. Joseph’s already used to wirelessly network its computers of wheels, laptops and Pocket PCs.

In early December, the hospital installed a dozen sensors in refrigerators on its main campus. That deployment took about a week, says Joel Cook, AeroScout’s director of health-care solution marketing. The facility uses plastic tie wraps to attach the nodes to the underside of shelves within the refrigerators. This month, the hospital began installing sensors to shelves in another 138 refrigerators at some remote locations; the refrigerators are Wi-Fi-enabled and store sensitive substances. The second phase of the deployment, Fennell says, will be the installation of sensors on most of the remaining 300 refrigerators, the majority of which contain food for hospital employees.

Each 2.4 GHz sensor node transmits a unique ID number and temperature data to the closest Wi-Fi access point. The information is then routed to the hospital’s back-end system, where MobileView software links the ID number and temperature reading with the specific refrigerator, and stores a temperature record that can be accessed by the hospital staff, as well as by Joint Commission inspectors, if they pay a visit to the facility. What’s more, the software sends an alert if the temperature deviates beyond the acceptable threshold, though it can be customized to do so only after a specified number of warm readings. In this way, if the sensors detect a warm temperature when a refrigerator door is briefly opened, it does not send a false alert.”

RFID has tremendous potential in revolutionizing the healthcare industry and the above example of a Sensors-based cold-storage solution is but one application. The others include hospital equipment (assets) tracking, people (patients and staff) tracking and document management. In fact, the ROI is probably justified from a defensive standpoint of avoiding lawsuits that may arise out of negligence or other unintentional errors, almost all of which can be eliminated by going in for RFID and related technologies.

This news item is from the RFID Journal – “M/A-COM Technology Solutions, a provider of microwave and RF products, has introduced a new EPC Gen 2 RFID solution for forklifts that includes laser and acoustic sensors designed to help improve tag-read and accuracy rates.

“The business problem is that it is very expensive to operate forklifts in high-volume warehouses or distribution centers,” says Bill Petry, strategic marketing manager for M/A-COM, which unveiled its RFID Forklift System at last week’s ProMat 2009, a Chicago-based conference focused on supply chain solutions. A typical warehouse, he explains, may operate 10 to 20 forklifts simultaneously, each moving pallets to and from numerous dock doors to rows of stacked shelves. “Each forklift probably moves about 20 pallets an hour, and the real challenge is to increase the throughput of the pallets processed, and to process those pallets accurately.”

Initial estimates by M/A-COM indicate that a company utilizing the RFID Forklift System would likely increase the throughput of moving pallets in and out by 10 to 20 percent, Petry says, with the added benefit of increased accuracy. He adds that a 10 percent increase in throughput is a very large cost savings. “Operator labor is the dominant cost element in these warehouse operations, dwarfing the forklift acquisition cost.”

Many warehouses employ bar-coding solutions to help ensure the correct pallets are moved. In a number of situations, forklift operators must then halt the truck, hop off and manually scan the bar codes located on pallets and shelves before loading or unloading them. This can be a time-consuming process that slows operators down, thereby decreasing the number of pallets that can be moved and increasing the amount of labor required—both of which add costs to warehouse operations. Several companies have wanted to leverage RFID instead, especially since so many suppliers are adding RFID tags to pallets. But simply affixing RFID interrogators to forklifts so they can read RFID tags affixed to shelves and pallets may not work.

“Warehouses are complex, and they are tough environments for RFID,” Petry states. “There is a lot of interference from the metal, and when there are racks and racks of pallets with RFID tags on them, when you drive a forklift around with an RFID reader, it will get lots and lots of reads. So how do you know if you have the right pallet being loaded onto the forklift?”

M/A-COM’s RFID Forklift System leverages sensors that, in effect, help filter out all of the other tag reads. The system can be added to new forklifts or retrofitted to existing ones. An Impinj Speedway EPC Gen 2 reader, acoustic and laser sensors, and two reader antennas (broad-beam and narrow-beam) are built onto the forklift’s load backrest (LBR). The broad-beam antenna reads all tags within a wide field of view, while the narrow-beam antenna is more directional and is used to interrogate the shelf tags. The acoustic sensor and broad-beam antenna help identify an RFID pallet tag after it has been loaded onto the forklift.”

This is one more example where the major cost of a particular process or operation is identified (in this case – operator labor) and then ROI calculated based on the implementation of a solution involving RFID and related technologies like Sensors, thereby providing a compelling case for a customer buy-in. There are several such opportunities in many industries today where an existing method can be improved upon by the use of RFID.

Mark Roberti from RFID Journal reports that “Sam’s Club, the warehouse retail division of Wal-Mart Stores, has sent a letter to its suppliers clarifying its plans to use radio frequency identification tags based on Electronic Product Code (EPC) standards to track pallets and sellable units.

The letter, dated Jan. 15, 2009, and signed by Sam’s Club’s CEO, Doug McMillon, indicates the retailer “remains committed to the vision of 100 percent EPC RFID labeling on sellable units,” and that the initiative will deliver “game-changing services and value” to club members, while also delivering value to suppliers. It spells out Sam’s Club’s plans for implementing EPC RFID technology, and provides suppliers with additional time to comply with the tagging requirements at both the pallet and sellable-unit level.

Twelve months ago, Sam’s Club had sent all of its suppliers a previous letter spelling out the deadlines by which it wanted them to apply tags to pallets and sellable units, and specifying service fees (up to $3 per pallet) that Sam’s would charge for each pallet or sellable unit it received without a tag. The purpose of the fee was to cover Sam’s Club’s cost in having to tag the pallets or sellable units itself (see Sam’s Club Tells Suppliers to Tag or Pay).

That earlier letter had indicated that by Jan. 31, 2008, every full single-item pallet shipped to its distribution center in DeSoto, Texas, had to bear an EPC Gen 2 RFID tag, and that by Jan. 30, 2009, all full single-item pallets shipped to any of Sam’s Club’s 22 DCs must be tagged. In addition, the previous letter stated that suppliers would be required to begin tagging sellable units bound for the Desoto DC by Oct. 31, 2009. The new letter lowers the service fee to only 12 cents per pallet, and notes that the tagging requirement will apply only to pallets sent to the DeSoto location this year, as well as the clubs served by that DC. Pallet-level tagging is expected to be rolled out chain-wide in 2010. According to last week’s letter, the deadline for tagging sellable units is “under review.”"

Although RFID as a technology has been in use for quite some time, it shot into prominence and got industry focus and attention only after the mandates from both Walmart and the DoD (US Department of Defence) to their respective suppliers. Sam’s Club, the warehouse retail division of Walmart, is now pushing very aggressively for EPC standards-based RFID enabling of its supply chain that promises to deliver benefits both upstream and downstream. While Walmart’s suppliers were slow in complying with its mandates, it remains to be seen how quickly its other division can get them to switch to this new way of working.