A Hybrid Tracking System of Human Resources: A Case Study in a Canadian University

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), including Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS), are technologies that have evolved considerably in the past few years. They have the potential to provide a means by which organizations can follow employees in real time. However, this permanent surveillance may have unexpected impacts on employees as well as on the organization itself. We followed the systems development research process to build a hybrid RFID-GPS system that allowed for the real-time location of human resources both indoors and outdoors. We tested this system in the security service of a Canadian university and explored its impacts on the workgroup and its employees. Our findings suggest that this kind of system can work in a real-world context, and that it has distinct impacts on the individual and the organization of a type not usually observed with more traditional information systems

Lean And RFID: Friends Or Foes?

The Lean Manufacturing principles and methodology seek to eliminate waste from systems.  Many of the lean techniques emphasize simplicity.  For example, 5S (sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain) and visual workplace management strive to organize and maintain the workplace so that it is easy to identify, find, and count items.  Visual signals such as Kanbans are used to time the movement of inventory.  The most basic utility of radio frequency identification (RFID) is to provide timing and location information.  Most RFID systems provide data that indicates when an item has passed by a reader.  As long as it is known where the reader was at the time of the read, location information is also available.  Readers are placed strategically so that after the read, the item’s location is known to be within a defined area.  Additionally, real time locator systems (RTLS’) use an array of readers to triangulate a more precise location for the item.  Implementation of RFID systems is being driven primarily by large retailers and the Department of Defense (DOD).  They are requiring their suppliers to attach RFID tags to the items they supply.  However, it has been noted that suppliers who just “slap and ship” tags will find RFID to be an added expense.  Suppliers who use RFID tags to improve their inventory and production management will find RFID to be an investment with a fairly short payback.  This article will explore the relationship between RFID and Lean Manufacturing.  Are RFID and Lean competitive or compatible?  Does RFID improve Lean systems or do Lean systems improve RFID

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Evaluating the reading performance of semi-passive RFID tags to enhance locating of warehouse resources: An experiment design

Copyright @ 2011 8th European, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS 2011)In the supply chain, a warehouse is a crucial component for linking all chain parties. It is necessary to track the real time resource location and status to support warehouse operations effectively. Therefore, RFID technology has been adopted to facilitate the collection and sharing of data in a warehouse environment. However, an essential decision should be made on the type of RFID tags the warehouse managers should adopt, because it is very important to implement RFID tags that work in warehouse environment. As a result, the warehouse resources will be easily tracked and accurately located which will improve the visibility of warehouse operations, enhance the productivity and reduce the operation costs of the warehouse. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the reading performance of all types of RFID tags in a warehouse environment in order to choose the most appropriate RFID tags which will enhance the operational efficiency of a warehouse. Reading performance of active and passive RFID tags have been evaluated before while, semi-passive RFID tag, which is battery-assisted with greater sensitivity than passive tags and cheaper than active tags, has not been examined yet in a warehouse environment. This research is in- progress research and it is aiming to perform tests for evaluating the reading performance of semi-passive RFID apparatus to provide an extensive RFID performance comparison for formulating an efficient RFID solution in warehousing environment

Antennas and Propagation Models in advanced RFID Systems

The demand for RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) systems in real-time identification, location-based services, asset tracking, intelligent transportation, security surveillance, item level tagging and many other authentication and management processes is continuously increasing. Since RFID systems are based on a wireless radio link between the reader and the transponders (tags), antennas for both readers and tags are recognized to be crucial elements of the whole system, together with channel propagation phenomena as multipath, clutter and path loss. Moreover, radio-localization techniques can take advantage of low-cost and low-size of RFID tags which can be mounted on the object/person to be tracked, as well as of easy-deployment of an infrastructure of networked readers. Therefore, a proliferation of RFID tag location and tracking solutions and their integration in commercial RFID readers or ad-hoc data processing systems is expected in the near future. In this context, during her PhD studies the author has dealt with some antenna and propagation issues arising in modern RFID systems. Part of the work has been devoted to Near-Field (NF) focused antennas for UHF/microwave RFID systems. Indeed, Near-Field UHF RFID systems are expected to combine typical advantages of UHF systems (high reading rate and data rate) with those of HF systems (robustness to the environment and multipath); communication occurs in the antennas near-field zone, like in the HF systems, but through an electromagnetic coupling. A Near-Field focused antenna for fixed reader antenna suitable for RFID portals has been designed and characterized. When compared to an equal-phase array, the NF focused array is able to radiate a higher power in the near-field region but with a lower power in the far-field region (the latter property being useful to better satisfy the EIRP limits). These advantages are obtained without increasing antenna cost and complexity with respect to a conventional far-field focused array. The design criteria of near-field focused planar arrays have been widely investigated and design curves have been carried out as a function of array size, inter-element distance and focal distance. The radio-link for Near-Field UHF RFID systems have also been investigated by referring to a significant set of real commercial antennas, through a careful numerical analysis of the impedance matrix associated to the system made of the reader antenna coupled to the tag antenna. Estimation of the power transfer efficiency, the far-field boundary and the impedance mismatching loss for practical RFID configurations have been obtained. A set of polarization alignments between the reader and the tag antennas have also been considered, as well as the “matched-antenna” case where two identical tag antennas are used at the reader and tag sides. Finally, location techniques for RFID tags have been examined and a new phase-based technique have been proposed (patent pending). It takes advantages of the fact that the tagged items move along a conveyor belt, whose instantaneous speed and path are known a priori. Algorithm performance is shown thorough a numerical model as a function of standardized UHF-RFID electrical parameters. The location algorithm can be implemented in a conventional reader that is based on an I-Q receiver, so the proposed technique does not require any modification of the reader antenna configuration usually adopted in RFID applications and it allows a simultaneous detection and tracking of all tags moving along the conveyor belts

Integrated ZigBee RFID sensor networks for resource tracking and monitoring in logistics management

The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which includes passive and active systems and is the hottest Auto-ID technology nowadays, and the wireless sensor network (WSN), which is one of the focusing topics on monitoring and control, are two fast-growing technologies that have shown great potential in future logistics management applications. However, an information system for logistics applications is always expected to answer four questions: Who, What, When and Where (4Ws), and neither of the two technologies is able to provide complete information for all of them. WSN aims to provide environment monitoring and control regarded as When and What , while RFID focuses on automatic identification of various objects and provides Who (ID). Most people usually think RFID can provide Where at all the time. But what normal passive RFID does is to tell us where an object was the last time it went through a reader, and normal active RFID only tells whether an object is presenting on site. This could sometimes be insufficient for certain applications that require more accurate location awareness, for which a system with real-time localization (RTLS), which is an extended concept of RFID, will be necessary to answer Where constantly. As WSN and various RFID technologies provide information for different but complementary parts of the 4Ws, a hybrid system that gives a complete answer by combining all of them could be promising in future logistics management applications. Unfortunately, in the last decade those technologies have been emerging and developing independently, with little research been done in how they could be integrated. This thesis aims to develop a framework for the network level architecture design of such hybrid system for on-site resource management applications in logistics centres. The various architectures proposed in this thesis are designed to address different levels of requirements in the hierarchy of needs, from single integration to hybrid system with real-time localization. The contribution of this thesis consists of six parts. Firstly, two new concepts, Reader as a sensor and Tag as a sensor , which lead to RAS and TAS architectures respectively, for single integrations of RFID and WSN in various scenarios with existing systems; Secondly, a integrated ZigBee RFID Sensor Network Architecture for hybrid integration; Thirdly, a connectionless inventory tracking architecture (CITA) and its battery consumption model adding location awareness for inventory tracking in Hybrid ZigBee RFID Sensor Networks; Fourthly, a connectionless stochastic reference beacon architecture (COSBA) adding location awareness for high mobility target tracking in Hybrid ZigBee RFID Sensor Networks; Fifthly, improving connectionless stochastic beacon transmission performance with two proposed beacon transmission models, the Fully Stochastic Reference Beacon (FSRB) model and the Time Slot Based Stochastic Reference Beacon (TSSRB) model; Sixthly, case study of the proposed frameworks in Humanitarian Logistics Centres (HLCs). The research in this thesis is based on ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4, which is currently the most widely used WSN technology. The proposed architectures are demonstrated through hardware implementation and lab tests, as well as mathematic derivation and Matlab simulations for their corresponding performance models. All the tests and simulations of my designs have verified feasibility and features of our designs compared with the traditional systems

Location estimation in smart homes setting with RFID systems

Indoor localisation technologies are a core component of Smart Homes. Many applications within Smart Homes benefit from localisation technologies to determine the locations of things, objects and people. The tremendous characteristics of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have become one of the enabler technologies in the Internet of Things (IOT) that connect objects and things wirelessly. RFID is a promising technology in indoor positioning that not only uniquely identifies entities but also locates affixed RFID tags on objects or subjects in stationary and real-time. The rapid advancement in RFID-based systems has sparked the interest of researchers in Smart Homes to employ RFID technologies and potentials to assist with optimising (non-) pervasive healthcare systems in automated homes. In this research localisation techniques and enabled positioning sensors are investigated. Passive RFID sensors are used to localise passive tags that are affixed to Smart Home objects and track the movement of individuals in stationary and real-time settings. In this study, we develop an affordable passive localisation platform using inexpensive passive RFID sensors. To fillful this aim, a passive localisation framework using minimum tracking resources (RFID sensors) has been designed. A localisation prototype and localisation application that examined the affixed RFID tag on objects to evaluate our proposed locaisation framework was then developed. Localising algorithms were utilised to achieve enhanced accuracy of localising one particular passive tag which that affixed to target objects. This thesis uses a general enough approach so that it could be applied more widely to other applications in addition to Health Smart Homes. A passive RFID localising framework is designed and developed through systematic procedures. A localising platform is built to test the proposed framework, along with developing a RFID tracking application using Java programming language and further data analysis in MATLAB. This project applies localisation procedures and evaluates them experimentally. The experimental study positively confirms that our proposed localisation framework is capable of enhancing the accuracy of the location of the tracked individual. The low-cost design uses only one passive RFID target tag, one RFID reader and three to four antennas

RFID TECHNOLOGY SELECTION AND ECONOMIC JUSTIFICATION FOR HEALTHCARE ASSET TRACKING

Although Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technologies for inventory tracking have been growing in popularity, the healthcare industry has been reluctant to adopt these technologies. One of the primary reasons for this lack of enthusiasm has been the risk associated with electromagnetic interference between RFID/RTLS systems and medical equipment functionality. The other reason has been the substantial cost and complexity of implementing RFID/RTLS in healthcare organizations. In this study, we show that there are several ways to safely install RFID/RTLS systems to improve the inventory management processes of hospitals and clinics. We then analyze the inventory shrinkage (loss and theft) data of the Veterans Health Administration VISN 10 (the Veterans Integrated Service Network of Ohio) using a mathematical model to estimate the annual shrinkage. Finally, we develop an economic cost/benefit analysis database system in Microsoft Access that can be used to calculate the breakeven point of RFID/RTLS implementations, as well as calculate the expected reduction in inventory- related operating costs. This system can be adapted for cost/benefit analyses in similar inventory-intensive environments

Gestures Everywhere: A Multimodal Sensor Fusion and Analysis Framework for Pervasive Displays

Gestures Everywhere is a dynamic framework for multimodal sensor fusion, pervasive analytics and gesture recognition. Our framework aggregates the real-time data from approximately 100 sensors that include RFID readers, depth cameras and RGB cameras distributed across 30 interactive displays that are located in key public areas of the MIT Media Lab. Gestures Everywhere fuses the multimodal sensor data using radial basis function particle filters and performs real-time analysis on the aggregated data. This includes key spatio-temporal properties such as presence, location and identity; in addition to higher-level analysis including social clustering and gesture recognition. We describe the algorithms and architecture of our system and discuss the lessons learned from the systems deployment