Opinion leaders Join RFID Europe

The forthcoming conference RFID Europe will have many opinion leaders from across the world. Speaker Brian Dobson of Transport for London (TfL) will be giving a status report of the London Oyster card experience. This card scheme is the largest transport RFID card scheme in the western world. He says, “I will announce plans to move to the next generation of RFID technology for travel purposes. We are looking forward to hearing from many other industries on how they are successfully deploying RFID technology and hearing about the latest advances in it.’

By contrast, speaker Vidar Kvalheim from Norway says “I will describe how a problem of authorised access and stock control with hospital textiles has been solved using ISO15693 HF RFID” and Dr Peter Harrop of IDTechEx will cover apparel RFID in general because this is one of the newly vibrant sectors of the market.

Ciaran Connell of DecaWave in the Republic of Ireland is one of the many suppliers making first announcements. He is working on active RFID at 2.4 GHz. He says that he will announce a remarkable breakthrough in Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), one of the hottest applications of RFID today. It is a “Standards Compliant (IEEE 802.15.4a) Phy enabling indoor affordable (€2 in volume) system. It has precision location (+/- 10cm) for multiple assets (>11,000 in a 20m radius) whilst working off a single watch battery for more than 6 years. Indeed, it is able to leverage mesh capability (Zigbee & WLAN APs) with superior range (20m NLOS, 500m LOS) and data rate (6.8Mbps).” That could even mean that RTLS becomes affordable for personnel and assets in small and medium enterprises.

The NHS will be presenting with Jason Britton, Clinical Scientist at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Scotland planning to announce “the creation of a virtual equipment library using a modern open standards portable medical device tracking system”.

Three companies will announce breakthroughs in UHF RFID at the conference and Selexyz, the world’s largest user of it in bookshops will speak. Eight others will deal with new technologies and the investment summit alone has speakers from eight countries.

Organiser Corinne Jennings says, “We are delighted with the number of leading edge announcements this year and the international nature of the conference and exhibition. The associated visits to local centres of excellence are also new.”