Washington University Predicts An RFID-Filled Future

Apr 8, 2008 4:01 PM

Some University of Washington (UW) students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they've been, and with whom, stored in a database.

The project is meant to explore both positive and negative aspects of a world saturated with technology that can monitor people and objects remotely.

"What we want to understand," Professor Gaetano Borriello says, "is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two."

The technology, radio frequency identification, or RFID, is rapidly moving into the real world through a wide variety of applications: Washington state driver's licenses, U.S. passports, clothing, payment cards, car keys and more.

The objects all have a tiny tag with a unique number that can be read from a distance. Many experts predict that the radio tags, as an enhanced replacement for bar codes, will soon become ubiquitous, according to the Seattle Times.

Leaders of the UW's RFID Ecosystem project wanted to understand the implications of that shift before it happens. They're conducting one of the largest experiments using wireless tags in a social setting.

"Our objective is to create a future world where RFID is everywhere and figure out problems we'll run into before we get there," Borriello told the Seattle Times.

RFID has been used primarily to track goods in supply chains, and the RFID Ecosystem works as a kind of human warehouse.

For more than a year, a dozen researchers have carried around RFID tags equipped with tiny computer chips that store an identification number unique to each tag. According to the Seattle Times, researchers installed about 200 antennas throughout the computer-science building that pick up any tag near them every second.

The researchers hope to expand the project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to include participation by about 50 volunteers — people who regularly use the building. Volunteers will have the option of removing their data at any point.

The system can show when people leave the office, when they return, how often they take breaks, where they go and who's meeting with whom, Borriello says.

The technology seems less intrusive than a camera, but it's much more precise.

It's a lot easier to fool a camera with a blurred image or disguise. But the latest RFID tags contain a 96-bit code meant to uniquely identify an object or person.

Yet if people don't see the tags, it's easy to forget they are giving out information whenever they come within range of a reader.

"One of the most surprising things is how invisible these tags can be," says student Evan Welbourne. "It's a risk for people. I built part of the system, and I'm caught off-guard."

UW researchers are gaining some valuable lessons on how to make the technology useful while protecting privacy. Radio tags add a new dimension to social networking. The key is allowing subjects to control who sees what information about them.

They created an application called RFIDDER that lets people use data from radio tags to inform their social network where they are and what they're doing. The feature can be used on the Web and on a mobile phone, with a connection to the social-networking service Twitter.

Borriello can let Welbourne, the project's lead graduate student, see where he is all day, or he can modify settings so Welbourne can only see where he is within 15 minutes of their scheduled meeting. The system is transparent, so each can tell if the other has checked his whereabouts.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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