Pervasive Computing

In one of the more interesting evolutionary branches of RFID, tags and applications designed for temperature sensitive environments and products are being adopted in varying degrees (no pun intended).

During recent times, there have been many innovations in temperature sensor development which enabled more sensitive detection, accurate monitoring and real time notification, sensing capabilities of heat sensitive environments.

One such an example on RFID Weblog: http://www.rfid-weblog.com/50226711/the_temperature_sensing_rfid_tag.php

Applicability: it gives the retailer, distributor, restaurant a much better context visibility into the entire chain, thus enabling dispute resolution, better service and compliance etc. Better visibility for it’s own sake is like the ability to observe symptoms without the ability to offer diagnosis or medication.

There may be usage for such diverse areas as blood bank to hospital applications, produce on vehicle monitoring, on shelf monitoring, installation of sensors to ensure compliance. This kind of sensor may also be used for hazardous and safety needs, such as geothermal, utilities and any king of monitoring related to temperature.

Here is a sample video on YouTube from MIT Open Courseware which also discusses such applications of RFID:

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Some of you may have read about the Bloomingdale results, article here, it has been recorded that there is significant improvement in visibility of items within a store. The interesting outcome for me was that it also accounted for improvements in processes, in this case cycle counting. Cycle counting as you know is also a very common process in Warehouse processes – often complemented with physical counting.

Always On: In fact cycle counting as we know it may with more sophisticated sampling software and RFID be a pervasive always on source of counting information. Or it could be on demand triggered by not only a physical stimulus but a software signal.

SW as an Initiator: For example in order to reduce load on servers etc, when we run Wave planning or Allocation batches, we can with the right middleware trigger a count or read event to the reader or cluster. This would improve some cross channel operations tremendously. For example during very heavy loading periods where shelf (where there is deep stacking) and back room inventory is used to feed web orders and pickup from stores.

Real-Time REALLY!!: There is often a debate of how often to synchronize the store inventory with the promising and booking system. If we have a reader cluster that can scan a requisite space of items, the sync is moot. When a customer is ready to checkout, run the scan on demand & this time it is REAL TIME – real physical reads to real promising of inventory.

…… more to come in next week’s post

Also some thoughts on physical counting – which IMHO is much more interesting for software, and ultimately result in a bigger saving if RFID is used.