ThingMagic's Yael Maguire figured out how to get RFID tags to be read more easily and accurately. Now he believes there is nothing this technology can't do
Small and midsize businesses that take their places along the supply chain had better put aside concerns about RFID and start embracing the technology.
Customer such as Wal-Mart are demanding that suppliers -- regardless of company size -- tag cases of goods with RFID chips.
Yael Maguire is emblematic of the the kind of person who is fully immeresedin radio-frequency identification -- he as an RFID tag embedded in the clip of his work badge. Why?
"It was voluntarily, so we know where everyone is," said Maguire. There was a fire in his company's building recently and there was some confusion in finding everybody. Afterwards, the exits in the building were tagged with RFID sensors and employees were given the option of wearing RFID tags.
"We just got cubicles installed and it's hard to find people," he continued. "But anyone can find me."
Anyone can now also find anything on a palett of goods, thanks to Maguire. He has come up with a patent-pending way to more accurately "read" RFID tags — so much so that, using his method, the time it took to read tags accurately went down by 400 percent and the accuracy of the reading jumped to nearly 100 percent.
"Now the original purpose and intent of RFID can be met," said Maguire. For him, RFID technology, in which an RFID tag is embedded or placed on a product and transmits a signal that can be "read" by a receiver, is a "whole new way of communication."
It's a form of communication used largely for inventory tracking and management, although Maquire believes the technology ultimately has widespread implications. "It's just a matter of time and scaling it up," he said. "We prove it works and tags can be embedded in everything."
It's also a form of communication that Maguire, who is a founder and principal of ThingMagic, a company that makes the machines that read the RFID tags, believes has the potential to become more sophisticated and more precise.
At least that was his thinking when faced with a problem plaguing many of his company's customers.
The issue was that as the readers were trying to read tags on objects that were moving quickly in a large group, it was hard for the reader to "catch" all the tags and read them. This was felt most painfully in the retail world where a large palette of goods would be dropped off in the back of a store, and business owners would expect instantaneous feedback from their RFID readers. But usually only between 70 percent to 90 percent of the tags were being read with any sort of accuracy because the others were moving through the zone of the reader too quickly.
Business owners would then have to do their best to figure out how many things were in the palette. "I wanted to figure out how to up read rates," said Maguire. "If you have less than a 99 percent read rate it could destroy the business model because you don't know if you're missing [something] or [it's] just not being read. Then you have to start using traditional methods to count. Then why are you using high tech stuff?"
As Maguire saw it the problem was thus: How can a user figure out what to do if he or she doesn't know how many items there are?
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