December 23, 2006
Nokia RFID Phones To Monitor Security Guards
Here's watching the detectives. Well, security guards at any rate. (Anyone else remember that old British TV show, which pseudo-nebbish angry young intellectual punk Elvis Costello immortalized in his 1970s new-wave song ?) It seems Nokia feels the need to watch their secruity guards, so they're issuing them RFID phones to keep track of assigned work within some of their US premises.
Each Nokia handset has an embedded 13.56 MHz RFID tag and a reader. As soon as a guard enters the work premises, s/he waves an RFID-enabled employee id in front of the provided Nokia handset. This enables guards to log their in-time/ out-time.
The phone is carried in the open position while guards patrol the Nokia premises. This allows the embedded reader to pick up information in RFID tags installed at various locations on the premises, which will stand as a record of the posts the guard has supervised on that day.
At the end of the work shift, the handset is closed and data on the phone's RFID tag is transferred via the cellular network to a web-based application termed the Service Manager. Supervisors can retrieve the records in the Service Manager to get information about any guard's assigned and actual work.
RFIDJournal reports:
The RFID system has been in use for just four months at Nokia's U.S. facilities in Atlanta, Dallas, New York and Seattle. Thus far [...] ithas collected well over 5,000 reads on the guards' activities.
Nokia, who not long ago bought RFID manufacturer Symbol Technologies, is pushing the technology into other applications, including a collaboration with JCDecaux Finland. The latter provides billboards and other marketing materials. Nokia RFID-enabled phones will be used to track the installation and removal of billboards and posters.
[UPDATE: It was Motorola, not Nokia, that bought Symbol. Apologies for the error.]
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