RFID Technology and Automated Data Collection

Data is the foundation of all information systems and data collection is a crucial and costly activity. Recent development in automated data collection technology, including the radio frequency identification (RFID) and global positioning system (GPS), has significantly revolutionized many existing applications. Because of its ability to individually identify and track product items, RFID is particularly useful in business domains

A sector analysis for RFID technologies: fundamental and technical analysis for financial decision making problems

Automatic identification technologies have been used in a wide range of applications for reducing the amount of time and labor needed to input data and improving data accuracy. As an important automatic identification technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies allow contactless reading and these technologies are particularly successful in manufacturing and other environments where traditional identification technologies such as bar codes can not perform well. By integrating the RFID technology into their business models, companies may save time, lower labor cost, improve products quality and provide better service. RFID is the wireless technology that uses RF communication to identify, track and manage objects and collect and store data. RFID technology enables companies to develop applications that create value by tracking and identifying objects, animals or people. Business applications of RFID technology can be seen in areas such as manufacturing, supply chain management, software integration, security systems, asset tracking and many others. RFID technology was predicted to be one of the “top ten” technologies in 2004 by CNN. Although, the RFID market is less than five years old, it has been applied to many different industries, from retail industry to logistics, or from healthcare to service business industry – and it is still growing. Particularly, RFID has fundamental influences on today's retailing and supply chain management for applications like asset tracking the inventory control and management. RFID technology also finds major application in mobile phones and is widely used in toll collection of highways, for payments in restaurants, vending machines, retail and parking lots. There are a wide range of RFID systems currently being used or being developed. Examples to these systems include but not limited to the following; automatic vehicle and personnel access control for security (Simpson, 2006), airport passenger and baggage tracking (Ferguson, 2006), tracing blood for cutting down errors such as giving patients wrong blood types (Ranger, 2006), payment process systems (Ramachandran, 2006), production control in manufacturing (Liu & Miao, 2006), transfusion medicine (Knels, 2006) real-time inventory control by automated identification of items in warehouses, tracking and management of physical files, tracking of books in the libraries (Shadid, 2005). For some other applications, interested reader is referred to (Finkenzeller, 2003; Smith, 2004). RFID solution providers claim that their technology and solutions bring significant benefits and have valuable advantages in practice. As new RFID solutions being developed and more RFID tags and equipments being used, these solutions will become more cost effective and RFID businesses are expected to grow rapidly. Since RFID is fairly new, it’s difficult to measure resulting sales increases or heightened customer satisfaction quotients. On the other hand, according to IDC estimation (IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group, a leading technology media, research, and events company and provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets), companies in the retail sector will spend nearly $1.3 billion on RFID in their supply chain operations in 2008, compared to about$91.5 million in 2003 which corresponds to annual growth rate of 70 percent. In a similar look; the Wireless Data Research Group projected that the global market for RFID increased from $1 billion in 2003 to$3 billion in 2007 (Asif & Mandviwalla, 2005). There are two major drivers of this growth. The first one is the adoption of RFID technology by major retailers and government agencies. The second one is the reduction in the price of RFID tags, readers, and IT systems required to deploy RFID. Given the huge potential of RFID technology, there has been a huge emergence of RFID specialty companies and the development of RFID practices within many market-leading companies. Due to huge emergence, it is desirable to make a sector analysis. In this study, we perform a sector analysis for RFID technologies for researchers and analysts. We investigate public RFID companies traded on the stock exchange markets, summarize their financial performance, describe their RF products, services, and applications, and perform fundamental and technical analysis

Designing of UHF- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Antenna

A research was submitted to International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Research (IJSER) Volume 1 Issue 3, November 2013Radio frequency identification (RFID) as a rapid developing automatic wireless data collection technology, set interest for industrials and government applications. The demand on the automated supply chain and logistics has been pervasive, aiming to replace the tedious bar-code labeling, and has driven an increasing number of research activities on the RFID as alternative solution. Regardless of the type, all RFID tags have two main components: an antenna which transmits and receives data and an integrated circuit (IC) called transponder that handles the data processing, data storing and signal modulating. This paper gives an insight look on RFID technology, concept theory for passive RFID antenna, impedance matching, and antenna size reduction techniques. The designing and simulation for passive UHF-RFID antenna is presented

Feasibility Study of RFID Technology for Construction Load Tracking

INE/AUTC 10.0

Teaching and learning mathematics and science in English in primary schools in the state of Johor, Malaysia

This article attempts to highlight the opinions of the public on the effectiveness of the use of English in teaching and learning Mathematics and Science (PPSMI) in primary schools in Johor. After nearly six years of its implementation, some people found out that the students have not demonstrated a good command of the language and the acquisition of knowledge of Mathematics and Science is seen to be declining. The teachers also do not seem to adapt well in the implementation. A group of respondents from among the headmasters and headmistress have given their views through a questionnaire and structured interview that showed the government's intention to strengthen the English language in teaching and learning Mathematics and Science did not show an impressive result. Thus, the study suggests that the government can try to give an option of using both languages in the implementation of this policy

Antecedents and outcomes of brand management from the perspective of resource based view (RBV) theory

Brand management requires greater emphasis on internal factors to increase brand performance. A model of antecedents and outcomes of brand management is developed in this study based on the Resource Based View (RBV) Theory. Top management emphasis on brand, corporate supportive resources and market orientation are identified as crucial internal factors or antecedents for success of brand management. Apart from that, the brand management measurement are expanded in this study with the introduction of three new marketing constructs namely marketing capabilities, innovation and brand orientation as new dimensions in brand management which currently comprised of management related constructs. This study also contributes in the brand management of small and medium enterprise (SMEs) literature as previous studies mainly focused on the brand management for multinational companies or large organizations. One important issue of SMEs is the “internal” brand management which is currently under-researched even though it is critical in brand building and management. Therefore, this research aims to highlight the antecedents and outcomes of brand management in Malaysians’ SMEs based on RBV theory. A comprehensive literature review was done and a conceptual model is proposed in this literature review

Hybrid RFID-Based System Using Active Two-Way Tags

Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a promising technology that has experienced tremendous growth by revolutionizing a variety of industry sectors and applications, such as automated data management, the tracking of a specified object, highway toll collection, library inventory tracking, multi-level asset tracking, and airport baggage control. For many RFID applications, it is desired to maximize the operating distance or read range. This thesis proposes a design of an analog front-end architecture and the baseband controller for a Class-4 Active Two-Way (C4-ATW) RFID tag in order to maximize or increase the tracking range by implementing a tag-hopping technique. In tag-hopping, C4-ATW RFID tags power their own communication with other C4-ATW RFID tags and existing passive RFID tag while the reader\u27s functionality remains unchanged. The simulation results indicate that the C4-ATW RFID tag can detect a minimum incident RF input power of -20 dBm at a 120 Kbps data rate. For -20 dBm input power; the achieved read range between a reader and tag is 36.7 meters at 4 W of reader power and between two tags, the read range is 2.15 meters at 25 mW tag power. Combined, the analog front end and baseband controller consume 50.3 mW of power and the area of the chip, including pads, is 854 µm x 542 µm

Penilaian kualiti persekitaran dalaman (IEQ) bangunan Akademik Institusi Pengajian Tinggi Awam (IPTA) Malaysia dalam konteks pengurusan fasiliti

Kualiti Persekitaran Dalaman atau Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) merupakan komponen penting dalam konteks bangunan mesra alam yang akan menentukan tahap kualiti penghuni di dalam sesebuah bangunan. Secara purata dianggarkan 80% kehidupan seharian manusia adalah berada di dalam bangunan. Ketidakseimbangan IEQ menyumbang kepada Sindrom Bangunan Sakit (Sick Building Syndrome) sekali gus memberi kesan kepada produktiviti para penghuni juga kepada struktur bangunan. Sehubungan itu, kajian ini dilaksanakan untuk mengenal pasti tahap kesedaran pihak pengurusan harta dan fasiliti di Institusi Pengajian Tinggi Awam (IPTA) terhadap IEQ dalam konteks bangunan akademik. Kajian ini juga bertujuan untuk mengukur tahap IEQ dan tahap kepuasan pengguna dalam bangunan akademik di IPTA. Kajian ini melibatkan bangunan akademik di 20 IPTA di Malaysia. Metodologi kajian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif, kajian saintifik dan juga pendekatan secara kuantitatif. Pendekatan Kualitatif digunakan bagi menilai tahap kesedaran pihak pengurusan harta dan fasiliti IPTA melalui proses temubual yang melibatkan 20 orang responden. Manakala pendekatan kedua adalah melalui kajian saintifik ke atas bangunan akademik yang memfokuskan kepada pengukuran elemen keselesaan terma, keselesaan bunyi, kualiti udara dalaman dan pencahayaan. Hasil pengukuran elemen tersebut dibandingkan dengan piawaian dari Malaysia Standard (MS 1525;2007) dan UNESCO. Bagi setiap IPTA, lima buah bilik kuliah dijadikan sampel dengan tiga kali bacaan setiap hari selama dua hari diperolehi bagi mendapatkan bacaan purata. Seterusnya, melalui pendekatan kuantitatif, data yang diperolehi melalui kaji selidik melibatkan 500 responden dan dianalisis menggunakan perisian Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). Hasil kajian menunjukkan kesedaran para pengurus harta dan fasililti di IPTA terhadap IEQ adalah baik tetapi masih ada beberapa kelemahan yang perlu ditambahbaik. Hasil ujian saintifik yang diperolehi menunjukkan bacaan bagi suhu dalaman, hanya UniSZA, UTHM dan UniMAS yang menepati piawaian, manakala bagi pencahayaan, UM, UIAM, UPSI, USM, UniSZA, UTM, UTHM, UTeM, UMS dan UniMAS berada di bawah tahap piawaian ditetapkan. Bagi keamatan bunyi, hanya UM, UPM, UPSI, USM dan UniMAP yang menunjukkan bacaan pada piawaian ditetapkan. Keseluruhannya menunjukkan bacaan berada pada tahap yang sederhana dan masih lagi memerlukan pernambahbaikan. Kajian ini turut mempamerkan bacaan purata bagi setiap elemen IEQ bagi bangunan akademik seluruh IPTA. Penemuan hasil kajian ini dijangka dapat membantu pihak pengurusan harta dan fasiliti IPTA dalam usaha menambahbaik tahap IEQ dalam bangunan akademik di kampus universiti sekaligus dapat meningkatkan tahap pengurusan fasiliti dalam mencapai tahap kelestarian kampus IPTA di Malaysia