Special Report

SPECIAL REPORT

RFID technology wants to get its sexy back. At least, that’s the impression I got at the IDTechEx RFID Europe conference in Cambridge, UK, in October. There seemed to be palpable nostalgia at the event for RFID’s glory days. That was when the world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defence banged the drum for adoption of radio-frequency identification technology among vendors. When drug companies began seriously planning technology investment strategies under the presumption that US FDA would mandate the use of RFID, its desirability shot through the roof. Those were the days.

RFID’s future as a track and trace tool among pharmaceuticals manufacturers currently is in limbo. And slow progress in setting global standards has dimmed some of the early enthusiasm for the technology. Put simply, RFID is no longer seen as a “silver bullet” for healthcare applications, noted Jörg Schmidt of Infineon Technologies (Neubiberg, Germany; www.infineon.com). “California’s e-pedigree initiative [for drugs] has been postponed, the FDA mandate is not what we thought it might be, and there are fewer projects in the healthcare pipeline,” he told conference attendees. “In the past three years, RFID has lost momentum in healthcare.”

But that is only part of the story. As Schmidt went on to explain, and as many industry analysts take pains to point out, RFID may no longer be the sexy ingénue, but it is still extremely attractive under the right circumstances.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

“RFID is an application-specific technology,” says Tony Jephcott of Magellan Technology (Stafford, UK; www.magellan-rfid.com), which designs and develops read-and-write 13.56-MHz high-frequency passive RFID systems. “But it’s not always the most appropriate technology. It won’t necessarily perform as well as some alternative solutions in certain applications,” he explains. “It is no good trying to force a square peg into a round hole.”

A few years ago, RFID was being hyped as the “latest, greatest, sexiest thing around,” says Jephcott. That was largely brought on by the huge opportunity of tagging cartons and pallets at dock doors using ultra-high frequency (UHF) technology. “UHF performance in this specific application area has fallen short of people’s expectations,” notes Jephcott, and that has slightly coloured people’s opinion of RFID as a whole.

“Companies that are successful in RFID and who understand the technology, as we hope we do, can target specific applications where RFID is by far the outstanding choice,” says Jephcott.

For Dan Gagnon from UPS Healthcare Lo­gistics Group (Atlanta, GA, USA; www.ups-scs.com/solutions/ healthcare.html), it comes down to making a black-and-white business case for the adoption of one technology over another. “RFID is one automated ID data capture technology,” explains Gagnon. “So you sit down and do the math and calculate the real business value it brings and how it will change processes.” Getting the most out of RFID often requires a shift in existing business practices, which is not always an easy proposition. One application where it made a whole lot of sense to incorporate RFID, however, is in tracking orthopaedic products.

Billing by Exception

Orthopaedic implants typically are supplied to hospitals and surgical centres in kits, which can contain more than 100 parts. When the kits are returned to the manufacturer for refurbishment, as few as 3% of the items may have been used, but the sets need to be thoroughly and precisely checked before they are replenished and sent back to the hospital.

Before the adoption of RFID by major orthopaedics manufacturers, “employees basically would unpack every single kit container and do a comparison using handheld bar code readers,” says Jephcott. Bar codes were used to keep track of the kit elements, which meant that all of the items had to be within the reader’s line of sight. The process also required significant manual labour. Orthopaedics manufacturer Zimmer adopted Magellan’s RFID technology throughout its operations in Asia/Pacific, which completely transformed this part of its business practice.

With Magellan’s PJM system, the tagged parts pass through a reader tunnel and are inventoried in a matter of seconds, regardless of their orientation or how tightly packed they are. “The software does a direct comparison to see what was actually used in the hospital and needs to be replaced,” explains Jephcott.

At the time of writing, Magellan was on the verge of starting a pilot project in the UK with another major medical device manufacturer, according to Jephcott. Similar in scope and application to what the company designed for Zimmer, the project will roll out in Great Britain by this summer, if all goes according to plan. That may be followed by an expansion to all of the company’s European operations.

Inspection and inventory control of orthopaedic products is clearly one application where RFID enables efficiencies that are beyond the reach of other automatic identification technologies. Capturing sensory data may be another.

So, How Cold Was It? Ask the Tag

“UPS is very interested in using RFID to capture sensory data from packages,” explains Gagnon. “The package could be tagged with a thin label, for example, that records shock and vibration or temperature data. That becomes a very interesting business case for us,” he adds, “because it would allow us to assess the stresses and strains that were put on the package as it went through the system. We can react to that data without knowing what is inside the box.” A German supplier of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for mobile medical appliances and other applica­tions has developed a low-cost chip for this type of application.

ZMD AG (Dresden, Germany; www.zmd.biz) introduced its RFID chip for temperature tracking in November at the Electronica trade show in Munich. The ZMD41211 is a fully integrated 13.56-MHz transponder with an on-chip temperature sensor and wireless initialization capability. It can provide a complete record of the temperature and humidity that a product was exposed to during shipment. Designed to enable automation and enhance safety, the ISO 15693–compliant passive chip is suited for the identification of pharmaceuticals and related products.

Track and trace applications for healthcare products are also on the radar of Switzerland-based MBBS (Cortaillod; www.mbbs.ch). It has developed RFID tags suited for use with surgical instruments that undergo sterilization. The chips capture all of the instrument’s milestones: Who has used the device? When? On whom? How many sterilization cycles has it been through? MBBS, which also makes the associated readers, has installed an RFID system at a hospital in Montreuil, France, to track trays and instruments as they are transported from the operating room to the sterilization unit and back to the OR.

German supplier alpha-board (Berlin; www.alpha-board.de) is channeling its R&D efforts into incorporating RFID tags within PCBs that are used in medical equipment. “Our engineers have identified several ways to accomplish this,” says marketing director Gregor Groß. The most cost-effective method is to attach a small RFID-enabled label to the chip, much like attaching a conventional bar code. “We can also drill a hole in the PCB, deposit the tag inside, and cover it with UV-curable adhesive,” says Groß. “We can even put tags in inner layers. This makes it impossible to manipulate; you need to destroy the product in order to get to the tag.”

One intriguing application that alpha-board presented at the Compamed trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany, in November involved the use of RFID technology to determine the number of times a device has been used, and to alert the user when it is time to replace it. “Let’s say a manufacturer guarantees its products fit for use through 50 cleaning cycles,” says Groß. “A tag could record the number of times a device has been cleaned and, then, alert the user to order a new one when 10 cycles are left.”

RFID Plus

But the future of RFID for many observers resides in a blend of technologies—what Richard Rees of Scanology B.V. (Boxmeer, Netherlands; www.scanology.nl) calls RFID plus. “You need connectivity, real-time visibility of data,” he explains, “a blend of technologies in which RFID is part of a system.” Did anyone say mobile phone?

One emerging technology enables communication among RFID-enabled disposable temperature and noninvasive blood glucose monitor patches and a mobile phone, PDA, or similar portable device. Alerts can be issued directly on the mobile device to notify the patient that insulin is low or, in critical situations, the alerts could be routed to healthcare providers or emergency personnel, according to the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIMGlobal; www.aimglobal.org). “Using disposable passive RFID-enabled sensors and a mobile device to record or report a patient’s condition takes advantage of existing technology and, in many cases, can eliminate the need for expensive, dedicated medical equipment or supplies,” writes Bert Moore in the association’s newsletter. “This is not a futuristic vision,” he adds. “The temperature sensor has been developed and the blood glucose monitor has been prototyped.”

Now, that’s what you might call upward mobility. Hey, maybe RFID is getting its sexy back, after all.

EMDM associate editor Yvonne Klopping contributed to this article.