October 31, 2006
More About Tracking People With RFID
In my post Can RFID track people?, I talked about "after the fact trail analysis", where companies can at least see where their employees have been - if not track them - using contactless employee pass cards. It isn't a real-time location system (RTLS). To do that with RFID, without using GPS technology. Or at least specialized hybrid RFID and Wi-Fi technology.
Now contactless cards generally have too short a read range, but I'm hypothesizing that you can track a society's inhabitants using RFID and Wi-Fi. Let's ignore the logistics of programming, the cost of technology, and the sheer computing power needed. Say we want to focus on a tracking a single person. Here's the hypothetical scenario. The fictional society in question has a tight-knit grid of RFID scanners, and everyone wears an RFID wristband/ watch with Wi-Fi communication as well. Each wristwatch is coded with a unique value that identifies the person wearing it. It could be government tax id, such as the SSN - Social Security Number - or what have you.
Think that there would be too many wristwatches to track simultaneously? Some of the new RFID tech being used to handle bins of drugs or other product can read thousands of tags per minute. But in this case, you are trying to track a single person, a single code. Anything else can be ignored. So, continuing with the scenario, you have a person passing a scanner every few feet. Somewhere in some control room, that information can be filtered for one person/ code.
What results is a near real-time "trail" of where that person has been. From this, relatively simply mathematics can be used to study the person's "trail vector(s)" and determine where they might be going. Then a force of "robo cops" outfitted with wireless technology, HUD (Heads-Up Display) goggles, wearable computers, Bluetooth earpieces, etc., could be notified and move to intercept the person.
Now of course, I took a lot of liberties assuming this and that above. And since the devil is in the details, it's those assumptions that have to be resolved for such a science fictional scenario. But I stand by my position that radio frequency technology CAN be used to track a single someone provided the technical and financial conditions are satisified. And it's the ability, not necesarily the actuality, that is frightening.
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