How does one go about taking care of one’s property – one’s worldly possessions? Well, the majority of people put their money in the bank, put the jewellery in a safe and insure the rest. But insurance is not really taking care of your possessions, is it? It is taking care of yourself so that you do not have renew them with your own money.
In the old days, and even now, I suppose in some places, you would hire a boy to watch over your sheep or cattle or bring them in at night for fear of lions, wolves or rustlers. These were an early form of security guard and indeed wealthy people had and often still do have personal body guards.
What if you had a substantial office with a hundred laptop computers – laptops because people had to do field work too? How would you keep track on all those? A car is another good case in point and construction site machinery is being stolen all the time even from under the watchful gaze of (or with the compliance of) private security companies.
So what can you do? Get dogs? That works sometimes, but they can be poisoned. Get video cameras and passive infra-red movement sensors linked to a control centre? That works and many firms and private houses have it, but it is very expensive.
As a cheap alternative, the police were handing out free pens in the UK, which wrote in invisible ink. The idea was to put your postcode and house number. This ink became visible under a certain kind of light. That is all very well 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 way that is becoming reasonably priced. The idea has been around for approximately 85 years, but it was too pricey to use on anything smaller than an airplane or a battle tank.
I am talking about radio frequency identification or RFID for short. The concept is the same one that aircraft have been using since during the Second World War – a transponder sends out precoded information in answer to a demand from an RF reader.
Details regarding ownership and details of what the item is can be written to an RFID chip also known as a tag and the tag can then be taped inside the item that it is to safeguard.
There are two varieties of tag: the passive and the active. Passive tags will only reply if information is asked for by a reader, whereas an active tag is always on.
Many entrepreneurs use RFID tagging to keep track of their assets. In the case of farm animals, most cattle are tagged nowadays. Most large offices have their IT goods tagged as well and we all know that clothing stores have been tagging garments for years, although perhaps you did not realize what that button was that they were taking off at the checkout.
People 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 too. Insurance companies may demand on it.
Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is now concerned with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.