RFID Power for the People
A university senior has developed a social-networking system to share information about tagged objects, places and people.
By Beth Bacheldor
Apr. 1, 2007—Phillip Nelson, a computer science major at Cornell University, has created an RFID system, dubbed Subni, designed to help the visually impaired navigate their environment. When a person carrying a handheld RFID reader nears an object tagged with a passive, high-frequency tag, the reader scans the tag and communicates the tag's unique ID number to a nearby Microsoft Pocket PC. Then client software, called SoundTag, correlates the tag with information, and a voice synthesizer translates that information into audible sounds.
As Cornell plans to test the system—300 objects around its campus have been tagged—Nelson is pushing Subni to the next frontier: the Internet. His dream is to create a Web-based social network that lets people input and access information about objects, places and even people.
The system uses RFID technology, wireless Bluetooth communications, a Microsoft Pocket PC, a Web site (www.subni.com) and a back-end database. Nelson invites anyone interested to create a free account, affix HF tags based on the ISO 15693 standard for 13.56 MHz transponders to objects in their environment and then enter each tag's unique ID number and any related information about the object into a secure database.
Apr. 1, 2007—Phillip Nelson, a computer science major at Cornell University, has created an RFID system, dubbed Subni, designed to help the visually impaired navigate their environment. When a person carrying a handheld RFID reader nears an object tagged with a passive, high-frequency tag, the reader scans the tag and communicates the tag's unique ID number to a nearby Microsoft Pocket PC. Then client software, called SoundTag, correlates the tag with information, and a voice synthesizer translates that information into audible sounds.
As Cornell plans to test the system—300 objects around its campus have been tagged—Nelson is pushing Subni to the next frontier: the Internet. His dream is to create a Web-based social network that lets people input and access information about objects, places and even people.
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| The Subni social-networking system uses RFID technology, wireless Bluetooth communications, a Microsoft Pocket PC, a Web site and a back-end database. |
The system uses RFID technology, wireless Bluetooth communications, a Microsoft Pocket PC, a Web site (www.subni.com) and a back-end database. Nelson invites anyone interested to create a free account, affix HF tags based on the ISO 15693 standard for 13.56 MHz transponders to objects in their environment and then enter each tag's unique ID number and any related information about the object into a secure database.
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