RFID Brings Bottled Water to Students

Oct 31, 2012In the spring semester of 2012, students and faculty members at West Virginia University (WVU) became some of the earliest users of an RFID-enabled water bottle refilling kiosk known as the Evive Station—provided by a startup company with the same name—aimed at eliminating the need for disposable water bottles. Each user pays a one-time fee to purchase a water bottle fitted with a high-frequency (HF) passive RFID tag. Once the bottle is empty, that user can have the bottle refilled with filtered water for free at an Evive Station kiosk. During the cleaning and refilling process, the kiosk's video screen displays advertisements matching that user's particular demographic profile.

Evive Station makes its money not from selling water, but by providing advertising to customers. The benefits, the company explains, are free water for users, access to consumers for advertisers, and less trash deposited in landfills. The firm also shares its profits with the schools at which it installs its stations, beginning with WVU.

The idea of a refilling water station occurred to Thomas Petrini, a recent college graduate who was attending a Net Impact conference in 2007. The young entrepreneur noticed that although conference-goers received refillable water bottles, few actually used them because they couldn't be easily cleaned. What's more, he noticed, if the bottles were not cleaned properly prior to being filled, the water emitted a strong plastic smell. Petrini considered developing a solution that would not only provide water from a refilling station, but also wash the container. After some thought, he incorporated the concept of using advertising to pay for the water refills.

By 2011, Petrini—along with two other recent college graduates, Jason Yablinsky and Stephen Jacobs—founded Evive Station. Manufacturing services company Daedelus Product Development built the refilling kiosk, which includes three RFID readers (one to verify the tag and two to refill or wash chambers), a water refill connection and washing mechanism, and a video screen. Jacobs wrote the software for a hosted server to enable bottle washes and refills, as well as advertising content, to appear on the video screen, according to an individual's demographic information, linked to the ID number on the RFID tag of that person's bottle.

The company is targeting the university market first, Yablinsky says, because several colleges have already banned bottled water on campus due to the environmental impact of discarded plastic bottles. He envisions that the system would also work well within office buildings and other corporate environments.

For students at colleges in which bottles have been banned, or for individuals who prefer not to use disposable bottles, there are few alternatives, Yablinsky says. They can carry some sort of container from home, but cleaning and refilling it can be difficult, especially for students living in dormitories who lack access to kitchen sinks.

Evive Station expects to install 15 to 20 of its kiosks across WVU's campus by December 2012. Individuals who would like to use the kiosks can visit the company's Web site and order a bottle. Currently, the company offers plastic bottles, though stainless steel or glass bottles may be offered in the future. When making a purchase, an individual inputs some demographic information, including his or her gender, age and interests, after which that person is then provided with an activation code for use with the bottle he or she will receive in the mail. The bottle comes with an Avery Dennison AD 720X 13.56 MHz passive HF RFID tag (complying with the ISO 15693 standard) embedded between two plastic layers on its bottom. When the bottle arrives, the user can take it to an Evive Station kiosk and place the tagged bottle within read range of an Austriamicrosystems AS3910 RFID interrogator modified for this specific application.

The station instructs the user to place the bottle on an illuminated ring, in order to ensure that its tag is read. The reader captures the unique ID number encoded to the bottle's RFID tag, explains Jacobs (who is also the company's software engineer), and forwards that information to a back-end server hosted by Evive Station, via a cabled connection. Evive's software determines whether the ID number has been used. If it has not, the station displays instructions for the user to input an activation code, create a four-digit PIN and choose one of two options: washing and filling the bottle, or refilling the bottle without cleaning it.

If the user opts to wash and refill the bottle, a door in the kiosk slides open to reveal a compartment. The user places the bottle inside the compartment, where another reader captures and validates the tag's ID number. The compartment door closes, and the bottle is then washed under high pressure and refilled. This process takes a little more than one minute, the company reports, during which the kiosk's video screen displays advertising matched to that user's demographic information. For example, someone who listed interests including the outdoors might be shown advertisements for a sporting goods store.

Users in a hurry might choose only to refill the bottle (without washing it first), a process that lasts only about 30 seconds. If so, he or she places the bottle within a different compartment in the machine, where a third RFID reader interrogates the tag, confirms its validity and prompts the refilling process. Advertisements are again displayed specific to that user's demographic.

Initially, the technology was tested using stainless steel bottles at four Evive Stations at WVU. However, to make the tags operate properly, they needed to be separated from the steel, which required the inclusion of a chamber in the cup's bottom, separating the tag and the cup's steel surface. This reduced the volume of water that the bottle could hold, Yablinsky says, so the company redesigned the bottle to be plastic.

The testing also yielded some other lessons, Yablinsky notes. For example, the four kiosks installed at WVU were so popular that there were lines of as many as 25 people waiting to have their bottles refilled at any given time. That early version of the kiosk offered no refill-only option, so each transaction lasted about one minute. The modified version, as a result of that pilot, can move users more quickly through the station, by offering the quicker refill-only option.

The company currently has about 30 participating advertisers—some local to the area in which a specific kiosk is installed, as well as others regionally or nationally based. These include companies that sell vacation packages, cell phones or other products popular to college students and faculty members.

Evive Station shares data with advertisers indicating how many times individuals viewed their advertisements, though it does not share any personal details. Any personal data cannot be accessed by outside parties, Yablinsky notes, since the tag carries only an RFID number. Moreover, an Evive Station bottle cannot be utilized by someone who finds or steals one, since a PIN is also required. Some users had asked if the system could track their movements around the campus, he says, and the company assured them that it can only read a tag placed in the kiosk for refilling, since the system employed HF RFID technology with a very close read range.

An advertiser pays a fee according to the total number of times that its advertisements are viewed.

Although WVU is the first college to sign a contract to use the technology, other colleges are currently planning to utilize the system as well during this school year.