Mar 06, 2014NeWave Sensor Solutions, a five-year-old RFID firm based in Ohio, set out to tackle some of the limitations associated with item-level tagging for fast-moving consumer goods, such as razors, baby formula and energy drinks. This week, the company unveiled its comprehensive solution, known as the NeWave Smart Shelf, which employs NeWave's patented antenna technology, EPC Gen 2 readers and tags, and an application that can run on tablets or smartphones. The technology has been tested in proof-of-concept implementations at several retail sites during the past two years, and is now commercially available as a complete solution.
For retailers, RFID has had several shortcomings, says Joe Ryan, NeWave's CEO, primarily with regard to achieving accurate reads for item-level tags. The industry has "focused on readers," Ryan says. "There has been a lot of work on transponders, and there is a plethora of software and middleware solutions. But no one had really focused on a key element of RFID that can produce accuracy and controllability, if you will, and that is the antenna." He adds that "there are some inherent challenges with the patch antennas [used in most RFID implementations] that you can't overcome with readers and tags and software alone."
The cornerstone of the NeWave Smart Shelf is the Wave RFID antenna, specifically designed to address the needs of item-level tagging. According to Ryan, traditional patch antennas—originally built for medium-range communication systems—radiate beams in a conical fashion with polarization that is transverse to the beam's direction. Consequently, such patch antennas have difficulty reading tags if they are not properly oriented, and might miss a tag up close simply due to it lying outside the beam or having misaligned polarization. The NeWave antenna was designed with five small dipoles that radiate beams in a circular fashion, surrounding the antenna, even with a reduction in reader power. The beams radiate in different directions, illuminating the full length of the antenna, Ryan explains, and tags within the antenna's vicinity can be read regardless of their orientation or position.
With an improved antenna, Ryan says, NeWave set out to devise a solution that would work specifically for fast-moving, high-volume, item-level RFID. "The 'a-ha' moment came while we were sitting in a lab one day," he recalls. It was then that the team, which included NeWave's CTO, Dr. Walter "Den" Burnside, realized that they could use data captured from tags embedded in a shelf rather than affixed to individual items.
The NeWave Smart Shelf includes the Wave antennas, which are 1.5 inches wide and are available in 3-, 5- and 7-foot-long slabs (each antenna is capable of radiating 360 degrees equal to its length, so a 3-foot-long antenna can radiate out 3 feet). The antennas are affixed, either vertically or horizontally,)between the back board of a shelving unit and the shelves. EPC Gen 2 tags with unique ID numbers are embedded within shelf pads that can be retrofitted into spring-loaded shelf pushers. The pushers move products forward as goods are pulled from the shelves. The spring, composed of metal, covers the tags; the metal attenuates a tag's energy so that it cannot be read. But as products are removed and the metal pusher retracts, a tag is exposed so it can be interrogated and its data collected, thereby triggering an alert that the shelf requires restocking. Products containing liquids and metals placed in the shelf pusher atop the shelf pad further attenuate the tags.
A typical four-foot-wide shelf system would utilize four Wave antennas, a single RFID reader, RF cables, a Smart Shelf controller, shelf dispensers and spacers, and the RFID tags. The controller, a network appliance, is used to configure and manage the Smart Shelf technology and RFID reader. NeWave partners with various RFID equipment manufacturers for the components, and builds all of the systems in-house to complete a Smart Shelf.
The Smart Shelf solution automates the tracking of inventory and asset locations, thereby eliminating the manual counting of items, while also improving record accuracy. The system reduces labor costs and increases customer satisfaction, the company reports, by reducing the incidence of out-of-stocks, and also provides increased security for high-theft items.
Because the items are not individually tagged, the firm notes, consumers who feel that an RFID-tagged item poses a potential privacy risk need not be concerned. And other than a minimal metal foil cost for some items, there are no recurring expenses—just a one-time cost associated with the tagged dispenser trays, the reader and the antennas.
The NeWave Smart Shelf system detects and records items removed from the shelf. It also issues alerts—customized to trigger based on criteria set by the retailer for low-inventory limits—which can be sent as e-mails or text messages, or be announced over a public-address system. The Smart Shelf Web-based software provides graphical displays, out-of-stock reports, historical data and more. Users can view the information via a Web browser running on a PC, smartphone or tablet, after logging on to the hosted app. The Smart Shelf system can run in a closed loop, or be integrated with a variety of retail systems, via open application programming interfaces (APIs).
What's more, the solution can be integrated with a closed-circuit television (CCTV), and thus be used to protect against shoplifting and more organized retail crime, which typically involves a person swiping a large volume of products from a shelf simultaneously. In the event that this occurs, the Smart Shelf can trigger an alarm on the CCTV to capture video in that area, which can be automatically delivered to a tablet to alert personnel to a possible theft.
In 2012, NeWave demonstrated its Smart Shelf system at the University of Arkansas' RFID Research Center, in order to obtain feedback from industry experts and retailers who attended the demo. In late 2012, NeWave launched a pilot of the Smart Shelf, which it installed at three of a retailer's stores (see What Retailers Need to Know About Smart Fixtures, Shelves and Labels). The solution was used to track a portion of energy drinks at each location. During a nine-month period, Ryan reports, there was a 68 percent increase in on-shelf availability of the beverage. Since then, he adds, four separate companies have undertaken pilots, one of which has moved beyond a proof-of-concept stage and is now conducting a beta test.
NeWave is developing other products as well. The firm currently offers an RFID portal, available in floor- and wall-mounted versions, built using the Wave antenna. Plans are underway to develop smart shopping baskets and carts to provide retailers with additional data, such as the number of carts in use at any given time (which can provide automated counts of customer activity), or how many have moved out of a store and into the parking lot.
Additionally, the company is developing solutions for industry sectors beyond retail. Last month, NeWave announced a partnership with PiiComm, a Canadian provider of managed mobility services (see RFID News Roundup: PiiComm, NeWave Partner on RFID-enabled Medical Inventory-Management Solution). PiiComm and NeWave are combining their technologies into a Smart Inventory Management System (SIMS) to help hospitals and other health-care organizations more effectively manage medical supplies, valuable assets and staff compliance. The solution, featuring bins to house medical products, can automatically monitor the state of a hospital's inventory and the locations of all items.
An RFID tag is attached to each end of a bin, which is divided in half, forming "primary" and "safety" stock sides, so that as an asset's primary supply is depleted, the bin can simply be reversed on the shelf to expose the safety stock side. SIMS continually monitors and reports whether each product bin is in the primary or safety position, and the change data is consolidated in the SIMS Web-based software portal. The solution is designed to eliminate the need for kanban- and card-based systems requiring that employees pull stock cards or take some other action to ensure accurate inventory. In many situations, it can be retrofitted to existing shelving systems, and it is scalable to meet a customer's particular needs.
The NeWave Smart Shelf is available now, with price varying depending on the configuration. The company claims the solution is comparable to systems built using patch antennas.
