How does one go about taking care of one’s assets – one’s worldly belongings? Well, the majority of people keep their money in the bank, put the jewellery in a strongbox and insure the rest. But insurance is not really taking care of your assets, 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 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 usually, 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 put your postcode and house number. This ink became visible under a certain type of light. That is fine if you have a suspect or found goods.
Bar codes are not practical, the pen is better. It all comes back to insurance or security.
However, there is another way that is becoming affordable. The concept has been around for approximately 85 years, but it was too pricey 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 concept is the same one that aircraft have been using since during the Second World War – a transponder sends out precoded information in response to a demand from an RF reader.
Details regarding ownership and particulars of what the item is can be written to an RFID chip also called a tag and the tag can then be glued inside the item that it is to protect.
There are two varieties of tag: the passive and the active. Passive tags will only reply 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 instance of livestock, 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 realize what that button was that they were taking off at the till.
Individuals are already tagging their dogs, cats and cars and it will not be long before these asset management routines will be employed 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 now involved with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.