July 11, 2006
The Holy Grail of RFID-Enabled Consumer Gadgets?
RFID might be great for things like tracking milk crates, solving parking problems for city officials, or keeping an eye on your kids at a busy theme park, but there are countless other applications just waiting for someone to harness them into consumer electronics devices that makes people's lives easier. Here's a very short wishlist of some semi-fictional consumer items/ solutions that I'd like to see, which use RFID and other technologies. Business opportunities abound.
Consider this. It's late in the evening and the family's just finished shopping at one of those megamalls. You know the kind, where every parking section looks exactly the same, and there are no landmarks to distinguish where you parked. No problem. You pull out your RFID-enabled car locator keyfob, and a light meter (or chime) changes to tell you if you're getting warmer or colder.
Of course, the drawback is that if you're prone to losing keys and such, that may not always be a good thing. So, on your car lock, where the other half of your RFID locator is installed, is a biometric scanner. The scanner stores only the fingerprints of family members. If someone else finds your keyfob, they will not have easy access to your car. With cars in some states already equipped with the RFID-enabled E-ZPass highway toll road transponders, a locator solution could be built on top of such a transponder.
No doubt luxury cars are going to have such systems installed first, if some models haven't already. I couldn't find any info online using Google, but according to alarmist website TLDM, some car tires already have RFID chips in them (scroll down the page). Supposedly, the FBI can determine trip history, as well as correlate readings with your license plate, especially at Canadian-US border stations.
Similar to the car locator would be something to help you find misplaced keys - quite possibly the most commonly misplaced item in the average home. A small RFID tag on the key could be paired with a locator that separates from the tag. Although, for the absent-minded, it's not going to help if you misplace both parts of the RFID locator.
So my real wish is for some sort of multi-purpose RFID-enabled wristband - a holy grail, if you will, of consumer electronics gadgets. One that can find my keys or car, pay for my transit fare, get me through the checkout line in the grocery store faster, authorize my parking, pay for a movie ticket, play my bootleg MP3s downloaded from a torrent site, take VoIP calls from vishers or potential girlfriends, and show me the time of day. Now Heaven help me if I lose the wristwatch.
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