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Technology every educational institute, retail store needs: Radio Frequency Identification

Anant Bansal1949 19-Apr-2018

It started with World War 2 when the alliance of the Soviet Union and the United States of America started using a radio-based listening device for covert operations. The bug functioned through retransmission of incident radio waves from a source. This spy gadget was the first ancestor of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system, a unique but sparsely used technology in India.     RFID is used widely in a number of industries today, including retail, advertising, transportation, logistics, libraries, healthcare, etc. The average American Joe knows about this technology thanks to marking of pets with RFID tags that helps in identification. RFID-tagged dogs are almost always returned to their home through the info provided by the RFID tag.  Sadly, In India, this technology is far from the reach of common grocery shop owners, government schools, and rural healthcare centres. Only high-end showrooms and malls in metropolitans are using it to track purchases and shoplifting when otherwise it can be employed in a wide range of important tasks. For example, the city of New York uses RFID to enable adaptive traffic control.     Rural healthcare centres in India can use RFID for data collection. Each family in a village can be given an RFID counter. The analysis of data extracted from the counters of each candidate can help avert plagues and epidemics. If a single person shows symptoms of a particular communicable disease, the entire surrounding community can be screened through the data provided by RFID counters. Luckily educational institutes are working to make RFID technology cheaper and readily available.  At Alliance University, Bangalore, MBA students have implemented RFID system to create an attendance tracking system. This project was done in three phases. The first phase identified the relevant RFID technology. The second phase summed up necessary components along with suitable vendors. Third and final phase focused on implementation followed by programming, bug tracking, and troubleshooting.   The Alliance University students successfully managed to deliver an RFID tracking system under Rs 1,400 in a week’s time. It was somewhat a ground-breaking project since RFID readers and tags usually cost more than $1,250 (roughly Rs 80,000). Other educational institutes like Madurai Kamaraj University are applying RFID to turn their infrastructure ‘smart’. Madurai Kamaraj University features a smart library with kiosks that differentiates and issues books with the help of RFID.       RFID isn’t being widely used in India primarily due to lack of knowledge and availability. The infrastructure to implement RFID technology is present, it just needs execution. The need of the hour is to promote RFID projects. While Aadhaar is simplifying human registrations across different sectors, RFID tags and readers can ease the listing of long inventories in government facilities, thereby saving precious time.    


Updated 19-Apr-2018

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