Positek RFID Offering UHF System for Tracking Linens, Textiles

Apr 14, 2010Positek RFID, a provider of RFID-based garment-tracking systems for the hospitality and garment-rental industries, announced today that it has formed a partnership with Fujitsu Frontech North America to develop an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID-based solution for Positek's customers.

Currently, almost all of Positek's nearly 100 customers use high-frequency (HF) RFID tags, operating at 13.56 MHz and complying with the ISO 15693 standard, to track linens, uniforms and rental equipment such as mats (the remainder employ bar codes for tracking). But through its partnership with Fujitsu, Positek is now rolling out the ability to track items using UHF tags, which sport a longer read range than HF tags.

Two Positek customers are currently testing the Fujitsu tags in pilot trials, says Jeff Markman, the company's president. "The two advantages of UHF tags over HF tags are read distance and speed," he explains, "and that all boils down to reading bigger groups of items, faster."

Positek is offering its customers Fujitsu's WT-A511 RFID tag, designed for applications such as garment tracking. The inlay, which complies with the ISO 18000-6C (EPC Gen 2) standard, is covered in flexible plastic that protects the tag from water and extreme temperatures. According to the company, the tag—which is less than 2 inches in length—can survive temperatures of 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) for drying and autoclave systems, or 400 degrees Fahrenheit (204 degrees Celsius) for ironing, as well as the pressure of pressing machines.

Groups of hundreds of Fujitsu tags can be reliably read from a distance of 6 feet, Markman says, compared with just 20 inches, at best, with HF tags. What's more, says Dan Dalton, Fujitsu Frontech North America's director of new product development, because the tag-to-reader communication bandwidth is greater for UHF tags than for HF, hundreds of UHF tags can be read en masse, whereas only a handful of HF tags can be read simultaneously.

Currently, Markman indicates, Fujitsu's UHF tag is more expensive than the HF tags that Positek RFID currently provides to its customers. But using the UHF system will be less costly for new clients than the HF system, he notes, because in order to reliably read large numbers of HF tags, Positek must install conveyor systems with RFID reader tunnels at each read point within a customer's facilities. These tunnels and conveyors represent a "relatively high cost," he says, "but with UHF, you don't need tunnel readers" due to the tag's greater read range. And since many of the Fujitsu tags can be interrogated in groups as large as 500, an end user need not install a conveyor system to move the tagged items past read points. Instead, the tagged items can be pushed passed read points in large carts.

Positek RFID acts as a systems integrator for its customers, providing everything from software to hardware and system design, based on a client's particular needs. "Eighty percent of our customers get a turnkey product," Markman says, complete with hardware, which Positek resells, as well as the company's own RFID management and tracking software. For the remaining 20 percent, Positek integrates either its RFID hardware to work with existing software, or its software product to work with existing RFID hardware.

Attaching the Fujitsu tags to uniforms, Markman notes, takes a bit longer than attaching high-frequency tags, because the HF tags it uses are in a round form factor that can be sewn on with a button machine. The Fujitsu tags, which are rectangular, must be added to items in order to be tracked, by embedding each tag in a sew-on patch or label.

Positek RFID is not the first provider of UHF-based textile-tracking systems. Startup firm Linentracker offers a UHF-based tracking system for the hospitality industry (see Linentracker Automates Management of Towels, Sheets). And Foundation Logic, a provider of RFID-enabled linen-management solutions, recently installed a UHF-based system at British Columbia's Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, which is utilizing Fujitsu's WT-A511 tag to track its 35,000 textile items, including bed sheets, uniforms, towels, tablecloths and bathrobes (see Vancouver Hotel Tracks an Olympic Quantity of Washable Items).

Positek RFID and Fujitsu are offering demonstrations of the tags in Booth 643 at RFID Journal LIVE! 2010, being held this week in Orlando, Fla.