RFID Gazette

This sort of thing has been tried with different technologies in the past, but now Samsung has a refrigerator that uses RFID to tell you when certain foods are running low. [All Headline News via RFID News] Of course, to facilitate this, all of your food would have to have item-level tags. (Though there are a few produce suppliers who are experimenting with food grade RFID tags.)

Now here's where the really interesting stuff comes in: connecting a refrigerator to a cell phone. So, if both your phone and fridge have a wireless technology such as Bluetooth, the fridge could transfer information to your handset. In fact, if you had the right application, the whole setup could create a shopping list for you. My feeling is that we'll see more of these types of solutions. Though whether they are a good thing for humanity or will just make us more lazy has yet to be seen. Just make sure you pay your cell phone bill, or you may you go hungry.

RFID In China
China's RFID market reached nearly 800M (about US$100M) Renminbi in Q3 2006 and increase of 30% over Q3 2005.

Managing Patient Records
Advanced Pain Management (APM), a clinic in Wisconsin state, is using RFID tech from Alien Technology and Symbol Technologies (Motorola) to manage the records of 50,000 patients. The legacy system involved medical assistants driving records back and forth between a central location and 28 other satellite offices on a daily basis. The middleware, SmartInstrument, is from Reltronics. The entire solution, hardware, software and integration, is US$5,000, and was integrated into APM's ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system.

Gutter Think: RFID In The Sewers
Warendorf, a German city, is using RFID technology to maintain its 127 miles of seweres. Their system, which is tied in the city's GIS (Geographic Information System), tracks maintenance checks and allows workers to not have to use pen and paper. The result is more accurately recorded maintenance data. [via RFID Journal]