HALO Infant Protection System

EXI Wireless Systems Inc.

HALO is the ultimate infant protection

Details

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HALO is the ultimate infant protection. HALO "P-Tag" transponders will create system alarms if removed from the patient. Any attempt to exit the HALO system perimeter will invoke countermeasures and alarms alerting staff. The HALO central station is a computer with full color video display. HALO alarms and detection points are clearly identified in the graphical representation of your facility layout.

FEATURES
• EXI's exclusive patient tag senses if it has been removed from the patient.
• HALO supports up to 10 central stations, providing color displays of your facility's controlled exits and alarm conditions.
• Simple user interface minimizes staff training.
• Automatic patient identification for tag removal or egress alarms.
• Door bypass features allow staff to escort patients without alarms.
• Automatic door control prevents unattended patient egress.
• Industry leading lift elevator interface locks down elevators while minimizing staff interruptions.

Infant Protection
HALO transponders are specially designed for infants. Cut band technologies require constant supervision from staff to ensure the protective device remains on the infant during weight loss periods. EXI patient transponders' flexible band does not require repeated tightening. If the band does slip off or is intentionally removed, HALO will immediately notify staff at the central station by identifying the infant and the area where tag removal has occurred in your facility. The HALO central site will maintain a log of activity in the system including alarms, staff bypasses and tag removals. The central site is also used to re-assign patient tags when admitting new patients into the facility.

Flexibility
HALO can operate stand-alone or integrate into a larger system, providing your facility with the desired level of protection. HALO systems may operate in conjunction with:
• fire alarm overrides;
• lift elevator control;
• video equipment;
• various card reader systems;
• door mag-lock systems;
• paging systems.

EXI provides a full compliment of peripheral hardware such asannunciators and bypass devices to tailor your system needs.

EXI Wireless Systems Inc., Suite 100 - 13551 Commerce Parkway, Richmond, BC V6V 2L1. Tel: (800) 667-9689; Fax: (604) 207-7765.

VeriChip's "Hugs" Infant Protection System

by Donald Melanson

Information Week reports that VeriChip's RFID-based "Hugs" Infant Protection System sounded an alarm last week when the parents of an infant tried to take their baby out of the hostipal without authorization—security officials were then able to stop the parents before they were able to leave the hostipal with the baby. It's not clear if this is the first time the system was succesfully used or not, but it's currently deployed in some 900 hostipals in the U.S. In addition to preventing abductions, it's also designed to prevent accidental mismatchings. Man, they're totally wrecking on the premises for future Disney kids films, dude—the switched at birth plot device is like, classic.

Computer chips get under skin of US enthusiasts

Forgetting computer passwords is an everyday source of frustration, but a solution may literally be at hand - in the form of computer chip implants.

With a wave of his hand, Amal Graafstra, a 29-year-old entrepreneur based in Vancouver, Canada, opens his front door. With another, he logs onto his computer.

Tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) computer chips inserted into Mr Graafstra's hands make it all possible.

"I just don't want to be without access to the things that I need to get access to. In the worst case scenario, if I'm in the alley naked, I want to still be able to get in (my house)," Mr Graafstra said in an interview in New York, where he is promoting the technology.

The computer chips, which cost about $US2 ($2.70), interact with a device installed in computers and other electronics. The chips are activated when they come within 3 inches of a so-called reader, which scans the data on the chips.

The "reader" devices are available for as little as $US50.

Graafstra said at least 20 of his tech-savvy pals have RFID implants.

"I can't feel it at all. It doesn't impede me. It doesn't hurt at all. I almost can't tell it's there," agreed Jennifer Tomblin, a 23-year-old marketing student and Mr Graafstra's girlfriend.

'Abracadabra'

Mikey Sklar, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, said, "It does give you some sort of power of 'Abracadabra,' of making doors open and passwords enter just by a wave of your hand."

The RFID chip in Mr Sklar's hand, which is smaller than a grain of rice and can last up to 100 years, was injected by a surgeon in Los Angeles.

Tattoo artists and veterinarians also could insert the chips into people, he said.

For years, veterinarians have been injecting similar chips into pets so the animals can be returned to their owners if they are lost.

Mr Graafstra was drawn to RFID tagging to make life easier in this technological age, but Mr Sklar said he was more intrigued by the technology's potential in a broader sense.

In the future, technological advances will allow people to store, transmit and access encrypted personal information in an increasing number of wireless ways, Mr Sklar said.

Wary of privacy issues, Mr Sklar said he is developing a fabric "shield" to protect such chips from being read by strangers seeking to steal personal information or identities.

One advantage of the RFID chip, Mr Graafstra said, is that it cannot get lost or stolen. And the chip can always be removed from a person's body.

"It's kind of a gadget thing, and it's not so impressive to have it on your key chain as it is to have it in you," Mr Sklar said. "But it's not for everyone."

Mr Sklar's girlfriend, Wendy Tremayne, has yet to be convinced. She said she probably would not inject the computer chip into her body unless she thought it was a "necessity".

"If it becomes more convenient, I may," said the 38-year-old artist and yoga teacher. "(But) I'd rather have an organic life."

-Reuters

Photo courtesy Getty ImagesThe Australian passport served as a model for the new United States e-passport.

While many consumers happily -- or obliviously -- buy merchandise tracked with RFID tags, some people are up in arms about the federal government's legislation mandating that passports be embedded with RFID microchips.
On Aug. 14, 2006, the Department of State began issuing electronic passports, or e-passports. Prompted by the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed the e-passport as a security measure for air travel safety, border security and more efficient customs procedures at airports. The e-passport's enhanced security features -- a chip identification number, digital signature and photograph that acts as a biometric identifier -- make the passport impossible to forge.
The e-passport will help improve security, but with so much personal information embedded in the document, there have been many concerns raised about the e-passport's potential for identity theft. Two possible forms of identity theft that could occur with e-passports are:
· Skimming happens when someone uses an RFID reader to scan data from an RFID chip without the e-passport holder's knowledge.
· Eavesdropping happens when someone reads the frequencies emitted from the RFID chip as it is scanned by an official reader.
However, the DHS insists that the e-passport is perfectly safe to use and that proper precautions have been taken to ensure user confidentiality.
· For protection against skimming, the e-passport contains a metallic anti-skimming device. This device is a radio shield inserted between the passport's cover and first page. When the e-passport is closed, it can't be scanned at all; when it's open, it can only be read by a scanner that is less than 10 centimeters away [source: Department of State].
· To guard against eavesdropping, DHS has mandated that all areas where the e-passport is scanned be thoroughly covered and enclosed so that signals cannot be picked up beyond the authorized RFID reader.
­The e-passport costs $97. While the cost to you may seem steep, the cost of installing RFID readers in airports is even more staggering. Adopting the e-passport will require gradual change, but aut­horities are already discussing what added security features and improved biometrics the next series of e-passports will have.
The debate over e-passports pales in comparison to debates over human chipping. Next, we'll learn what RFID microchips are doing in livi­ng things.

Talking Tags

When the RFID industry is able to lower the price of tags, it will lead to a ubiquitous network of smart packages that track every phase of the supply chain. Store ­shelves will be full of smart-labeled products that can be tracked from purchase to trash can. The shelves themselves will communicate wirelessly with the network. The tags will be just one component of this large product-tracking network.

The other two pieces to this network will be the readers that communicate with the tags and the Internet, which will provide communications lines for the network.

Let's look at a real-world scenario of this system:

• At the grocery store, you buy a carton of milk. The milk containers will have an RFID tag that stores the milk's expiration date and price. When you lift the milk from the shelf, the shelf may display the milk's specific expiration date, or the information could be wirelessly sent to your personal digital assistant or cell phone.
  
• As you exit the store, you pass through doors with an embedded tag reader. This reader tabulates the cost of all the items in your shopping cart and sends the grocery bill to your bank, which deducts the amount from your account. Product manufacturers know that you've bought their product, and the store's computers know exactly how many of each product need to be reordered.
  
• Once you get home, you put your milk in the refrigerator, which is also equipped with a tag reader. This smart refrigerator is capable of tracking all of the groceries stored in it. It can track the foods you use, how often you restock your refrigerator and can let you know when that milk and other foods spoil.
  
• Products are also tracked when they are thrown into a trash can or recycle bin. At this point, your refrigerator could add milk to your grocery list, or you could program the fridge to order these items automatically.
  
• Based on the products you buy, your grocery store gets to know your unique preferences. Instead of receiving generic newsletters with weekly grocery specials, you might receive one created just for you. If you have two school-age children and a puppy, your grocery store can use customer-specific marketing by sending you coupons for items like juice boxes and dog food.

In order for this system to work, each product will be given a unique product number. MIT's Auto-ID Center is working on an Electronic Product Code (EPC) identifier that could replace the UPC. Every smart label could contain 96 bits of information, including the product manufacturer, product name and a 40-bit serial number. Using this system, a smart label would communicate with a network called the Object Naming Service. This database would retrieve information about a product and then direct information to the manufacturer's computers.

The information stored on the smart labels would be written in a Product Markup Language (PML), which is based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). PML would allow all computers to communicate with any computer system similar to the way that Web servers read Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), the common language used to create Web pages.

We're not at this point yet, but RFID tags are more prominent in your life than you may realize. Wal-Mart and Best Buy are just two major merchandisers that use RFID tags for stocking and marketing purposes.

Some critics find the idea of merchandisers tracking and recording purchases to be alarming. But retail isn't the only industry using RFID technology. In the next section, we'll learn how the government is putting RFID tags to use.­

How RFID Works

RFID Tags Past and Present

RFID technology has been around since 1970, but until recently, it has been too expensive to use on a large scale. Originally, RFID tags were used to track large items, like cows, railroad cars and airline luggage, that were shipped over long distances, These original tags, called inductively coupled RFID tags, were complex systems of metal coils, antennae and glass.

Inductively coupled RFID tags were powered by a magnetic field generated by the RFID reader. Electrical current has an electrical component and a magnetic component -- it is electromagnetic. Because of this, you can create a magnetic field with electricity, and you can create electrical current with a magnetic field. The name "inductively coupled" comes from this process -- the magnetic field inducts a current in the wire. You can learn more in How Electromagnets Work.

Capacitively coupled tags

were created next in an attempt to lower the technology's cost. These were meant to be disposable tags that could be applied to less expensive merchandise and made as universal as bar codes. Capacitively coupled tags used conductive carbon ink instead of metal coils to transmit data. The ink was printed on paper labels and scanned by readers. Motorola's BiStatix RFID tags were the frontrunners in this technology. They used a silicon chip that was only 3mm wide and stored 96 bits of information. This technology didn't catch on with retailers, and BiStatix was shut down in 2001 [source: RFID Journal].

Newer innovations in the RFID industry include active, semi-active, and passive RFID tags. These tags can store up to 2 kilobytes of data and are composed of a microchip, antenna, and, in the case of active and semi-passive tags, a battery. The tag's components are enclosed within plastic, silicon or sometimes glass.

At a basic level, each tag works in the same way:

• Data­ stored within an RFID tag's microchip waits to be read.
  
  
• The tag's antenna receives electromagnetic energy from an RFID reader's antenna.
  
  
• Using power from its internal battery or power harvested from the reader's electromagnetic field, the tag sends radio waves back to the reader.
  
  
• ­The reader picks up the tag's radio waves and interprets the frequencies as meaningful data.
  

Inductively coupled and capacitively coupled RFID tags aren't used as commonly today because they are expensive and bulky. In the next section, we'll learn more about active, semi-passive and passive RFID tags.

Reinventing the Bar Code

Reinventing the Bar Code

Almost everything that you buy from retailers has a UPC bar code printed on it. These bar codes help manufacturers and retailers keep track of inventory. They also give valuable ­information about the quantity of products being bought and, to some extent, by whom the products are being bought. These codes serve as product fingerprints made of machine-readable parallel bars that store binary code.

Created in the early 1970s to speed up the check out process, bar codes have a few disadvantages:

• In order to keep up with inventories, companies must scan each bar code on every box of a particular product.
  
  
• Going through the checkout line involves the same process of scanning each bar code on each item.
  
  
• Bar code is a read-only technology, meaning that it cannot send out any information.

RFID tags are an improvement over bar codes because the tags have read and write capabilities. Data stored on RFID tags can be changed, updated and locked. Some stores that have begun using RFID tags have found that the technology offers a better way to track merchandise for stocking and marketing purposes. Through RFID tags, stores can see how quickly the products leave the shelves and who's buying them.

In addition to retail merchandise, RFID tags have also been added to transportation devices like highway toll passcards and subway passes. Because of their ability to store data so efficiently, RFID tags can tabulate the cost of tolls and fares and deduct the cost electronically from the amount of money that the user places on the card. Rather than waiting to pay a toll at a tollbooth or shelling out coins at a token counter, passengers use RFID chip-embedded passes like debit cards.

But would you entrust your medical history to an RFID tag? How about your home address or your baby's safety? Let's look at two types of RFID tags and how they store and transmit data before we move past grocery store purchase­s to human lives.

How RFID Works

Long checkout lines at the grocery store are one of the biggest complaints about the shopping experience. Soon, these lines could disappear when the ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code is replaced by smart labels, also called radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are intelligent bar codes that can talk to a networked system to track every product that you put in your shopping cart.

Imagine going to the grocery store, filling up your cart and walking right out the door. No longer will you have to wait as someone rings up each item in your cart one at a time. Instead, these RFID tags will communicate with an electronic reader that will detect every item in the cart and ring each up almost instantly. The reader will be connected to a large network that will send information on your products to the retailer and product manufacturers. Your bank will then be notified and the amount of the bill will be deducted from your account. No lines, no waiting.

RFID tags, a technology once limited to tracking cattle, are tracking consumer products worldwide. Many manufacturers use the tags to track the location of each product they make from the time it's made until it's pulled off the shelf and tossed in a shopping cart.

Outside the realm of retail merchandise, RFID tags are tracking vehicles, airline passengers, Alzheimer's patients and pets. Soon, they may even track your preference for chunky or creamy peanut butter. Some critics say RFID technology is becoming too much a part of our lives -- that is, if we're even aware of all the parts of our lives that it affects.

In this article, you'll learn about the types of RFID tags and how these tags can be tracked through the entire supply chain. We'll also look at the non-commercial uses of RFID tags and how the Departments of State and Homeland Security are using them. Lastly, we'll examine what some critics consider an Orwellian application of RFID tags in animals, humans and our society.

What is RFID?

Short for radio frequency identification, RFID is a dedicated short range communication (DSRC) technology. The term RFID is used to describe various technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify people or objects. RFID technology is similar to the bar code identification systems we see in retail stores everyday; however one big difference between RFID and bar code technology is that RFID does not rely on the line-of-sight reading that bar code scanning requires

The Technology Behind RFID
With RFID, the electromagnetic or electrostatic coupling in the RF (radio frequency) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is used to transmit signals. An RFID system consists of an antenna and a transceiver, which read the radio frequency and transfer the information to a processing device (reader) and a transponder, or RF tag, which contains the RF circuitry and information to be transmitted. The antenna provides the means for the integrated circuit to transmit its information to the reader that converts the radio waves reflected back from the RFID tag into digital information that can then be passed on to computers that can analyze the data.

In RFID systems, the tags that hold the data are broken down into two different types. Passive tags use the radio frequency from the reader to transmit their signal. Passive tags will generally have their data permanently burned into the tag when it is made, although some can be rewritten.

Active tags are much more sophisticated and have on-board battery for power to transmit their data signal over a greater distance and power random access memory (RAM) giving them the ability to store up to 32,000 bytes of data.

RFID Frequencies
Much like tuning in to your favorite radio station, RFID tags and readers must be tuned into the same frequency to enable communications. RFID systems can use a variety of frequencies to communicate, but because radio waves work and act differently at different frequencies, a frequency for a specific RFID system is often dependant on its application. High frequency RFID systems (850 MHz to 950 MHz and 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz) offer transmission ranges of more than 90 feet, although wavelengths in the 2.4 GHz range are absorbed by water, which includes the human body, and therefore has limitations.

Common Uses of RFID
RFID systems can be used just about anywhere, from clothing tags to missiles to pet tags to food - anywhere that a unique identification system is needed. The tag can carry information as simple as a pet owners name and address or the cleaning instruction on a sweater to as complex as instructions on how to assemble a car.

Here are a few examples of how RFID technology is being used in everyday places:

• RFID systems are being used in some hospitals to track a patient's location, and to provide real-time tracking of the location of doctors and nurses in the hospital. In addition, the system can be used to track the whereabouts of expensive and critical equipment, and even to control access to drugs, pediatrics, and other areas of the hospital that are considered "restricted access" areas.
  
  
  
• RFID chips for animals are extremely small devices injected via syringe under skin. Under a government initiative to control rabies, all Portuguese dogs must be RFID tagged by 2007. When scanned the tag can provide information relevant to the dog's history and its owner's information.
  
  
  
• RFID in retail stores offer real-time inventory tracking that allows companies to monitor and control inventory supply at all times.
  
  
  
• The Orlando/Orange County Expressway Authority (OOCEA) is using an RFID based traffic-monitoring system, which uses roadside RFID readers to collect signals from transponders that are installed in about 1 million E-Pass and SunPass customer vehicles.

The Future of RFID
RFID is said by many in the industry to be the frontrunner technology for automatic identification and data collection. The biggest, as of yet unproven, benefit would ultimately be in the consumer goods supply chain where an RFID tag attached to a consumer product could be tracked from manufacturing to the retail store right to the consumer's home.

Many see RFID as a technology in its infancy with an untapped potential. While we may talk of its existence and the amazing ways in which this technology can be put to use, until there are more standards set within the industry and the cost of RFID technology comes down we won't see RFID systems reaching near their full potential anytime soon.