How does one go about taking care of one’s assets – one’s worldly belongings? Well, the majority of people keep their money in a bank, put the jewellery in a strongbox and insure the remainder. But insurance is not really taking care of your possessions, is it? It is taking care of yourself so that you do not have replace them with your own money.
In the old days, and even now, I presume in some places, you would employ a boy to watch over your sheep or cattle or bring them in at night for fear of big cats, wolves or rustlers. These were an early kind of security guard and indeed rich people had and frequently still do have personal body guards.
What if you had a large office with a hundred laptop computers – laptops because people had to do field work too? How would you keep an eye on all those? A car is another good case in point and construction site plant is being stolen all the time even from under the watchful gaze of (or with the help of) private security companies.
So what can you do? Get dogs? That works sometimes, but they can be poisoned. Install video cameras and passive infra-red motion sensors connected to a control centre? That works and a lot of businesses and private houses have it, but it is very costly.
As a cheap alternative, the police were giving out free pens in the UK, which wrote in invisible ink. The idea was to write your postcode and house number. This ink became visible under a special kind of light. That is fine if you have a suspect or found property.
Bar codes are not practical, the pen is better. It all comes back to insurance or surveillance.
However, there is another technique that is becoming affordable. The concept has been around for about 85 years, but it was too expensive to use on anything less significant than an airplane or a battle tank.
I am talking about radio frequency identification or RFID for short. The idea is the same one that aircraft have been using since during the Second World War – a transponder emits precoded information in response to a demand from an RF reader.
Details regarding ownership and details of what the object is can be written to an RFID chip also known as a tag and the tag can then be taped inside the object that it is to protect.
There are two varieties of tag: the passive and the active. Passive tags will only respond if information is requested by a reader, whereas an active tag is always broadcasting.
Many business people use RFID tagging to keep track of their goods. In the case of farm animals, most cattle are tagged nowadays. Most large offices have their IT devices tagged as well and we all know that clothing stores have been tagging clothes for years, although maybe you did not know what that button was that they were taking off at the checkout.
Individuals are already tagging their dogs, cats and cars and it will not be long before these asset management techniques will be used extensively at home as well. Insurance companies may insist on it.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is currently involved with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.