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 suppose in some countries, you would employ a boy to watch over your sheep or cattle or bring them in at night for fear of lions, wolves or thieves. These were an early kind of security guard and indeed wealthy people had and frequently still do have private body guards.
What if you had a substantial office with a hundred laptop computers – laptops because employees had to do field work as well? How would you keep track on all those? A car is another good example and construction site machinery is being stolen all the time even from under the noses of (or with the help 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 security.
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 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 requested by a reader, whereas an active tag is always broadcasting.
Many business people use RFID tagging to keep track of their assets. In the instance of farm animals, most cattle are tagged these days. Most large offices have their IT goods tagged as well and we all know that fashion stores have been tagging clothes for years, although maybe you did not know what that button was that they were taking off at the till.
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 writer of this piece writes on several 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.