Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that uses communication through the use of radio waves to exchange data between a reader and an electronic tag attached to an object, for the purpose of identification and tracking.
It is possible in the near future, RFID technology will continue to proliferate in our daily lives the way that bar code technology did over the forty years leading up to the turn of the 21st century bringing unobtrusive but remarkable changes when it was new.
RFID makes it possible to give each product in a grocery store its own unique identifying number, to provide assets, people, work in process, medical devices etc. all with individual unique identifiers - like the license plate on a car but for every item in the world. This is a vast improvement over paper and pencil tracking or bar code tracking that has been used since the 1970s. With bar codes, it is only possible to identify the brand and type of package in a grocery store, for instance. Furthermore, passive RFID tags (those without a battery) can be read if passed within close enough proximity to an RFID reader. It is not necessary to "show" them to it, as with a bar code. In other words it does not require line of sight to "see" an RFID tag, the tag can be read inside a case, carton, box or other container, and unlike barcodes RFID tags can be read hundreds at a time. Bar codes can only read one at a time.
Typical Applications for RFID
Automatic Vehicle identification
Work-in-Progress
Document/ Jewellery tracking
Inventory Management
Container/ Yard Management
Patient Monitoring
RFID can be read-only or read / write, does not require contact or line-of-sight to operate, can function under a variety of environmental conditions, and provides a high level of data integrity.It has been widely used across a multitude of industry sectors, and applications as varied as access and security control, livestock identification, airline baggage tracking, automated vehicle identification and toll collection. In addition, because the technology is difficult to counterfeit, RFID provides a high level of security.
