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THE WORLD'S RFID AUTHORITY
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RFID with bluetooth by syncosis software systems
by Andy Wong, posted 12/04/2004
3.1. Smart Product Monitoring The smart product monitoring scenario is an example for a pervasive computing scenario where interaction is initiated by a smart object. The object chosen for this prototype is an egg carton representing an arbitrary fragile object that is in storage e.g. in a warehouse. The object is augmented in such a way that it detects whenever it is dropped or not stored within the appropriate temperature range. Whenever such an exception occurs, it triggers an alarm by informing the appropriate contact person via an SMS. The challenges when realizing this application were to monitor the physical object unobtrusively (1) and to associate the appropriate contact person with the smart object without explicit manual pre-configuration (2). Figure 4: An egg carton augmented with a Bluetooth- enabled active tag. To monitor the egg carton, BTnodes with a sensor board for acceleration and temperature sensors are attached to the fragile product (see Figure 4). Based on sensory input from acceleration and temperature sensors, the state of the object is determined. If the egg carton falls down or is kept for too long under unsuitable conditions, the BTnode activates its communication module to send an alarm. The BTnode sends the notification embedded in an SMS message to the appropriate contact person via a Bluetooth access point that offers a gateway to the cellular phone network. The Bluetooth access point then forwards the message to a mobile the results back. Consecutive messages can be exchanged between interaction partners. For the user, the contact information of a smart product, i.e. its phone number, is implicitly given, because it sent the first message. Figure 5 shows an example of this process. Figure 5: An SMS notification received from a smart product by a mobile phone (1), a response message with activated history command (2), and the corresponding result from the egg box (3). The question how the smart object knows to what mobile phone number it needs to send the notification without explicit, manual pre-configuration is solved using passive RFID tag technology. The mobile phones of the potential contact persons are equipped with RFID tags. Whenever they enter the neighborhood of the smart object (for example a lorry or a certain room the product is in), a wireless RFID reader attached to a BTnode or a Bluetooth-enabled PDA communicates the presence of the tag together with service parameters, which describe how to access the device (e.g. its GSM phone number and Bluetooth address) via Bluetooth piconet broadcast to the active tag in the egg carton. Using the information from the RFID reader, the active tag in the egg carton is nowaware ofwho is sharing a symbolic location with the object it is augmenting and for how long. This location context and the history of that information allows the active tag to generate an interaction stub that contains the appropriate contact information. Message threads
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